Since my return to the UK and discovery of CA (Cocaine Anonymous) in Kent… of all the gruesome freaks I’ve encountered, Nick Batchelor is perhaps the worse. An arrogant, egomaniacal thug working with youth at Switch Youth Services and now for all the world to see on Channel Four in the show, Hunted.

He is a nasty piece of work who achieves status in any organisation he finds himself by reinventing the rules, intimidating and bullying those about him to achieve a gangsters respect and a limited incarnation of what he thinks maybe… power. He probably did this in prison and he’s doing it right now in his official capacity in Cocaine Anonymous.

To be clear, I wouldn’t have written this blog unless Nick had made the fatal error of appearing as a public figure on National TV.

When I turned up in CA with a decade more sobriety than he would ever have he immediately sought to tear me down. He discovered I was having a relationship with a closeted builder (now out of the closet) called Joe Owens. Joe… a shabby little fellow with all the shame based problems living in the closet incur: he met all of my friends, I was hidden from his. Whenever we saw each other at anonymous meetings he would ignore me, then meet me for sex in public places.

Why do we hate gay men who stay in the closet? Because they collude with people like Nick Batchelor. When our relationship ended Nick called me a nonce and a predator… openly in a CA meeting, accusing me of preying on vulnerable Joe. Diminishing the three months we spent together, infantilising a grown man. As if 30-year-old Joe were a child who could not know his own mind. To be clear: Joe has spent his whole adult life hooking up with strangers online. His particular turn on: strangulation. He came immediately with both hands tightly around my throat. Why? I imagine he had such disregard for his own homosexuality and the men he was having sex… only the potential death of his sex partner would give him release.

Nick Batchelor met his partner in the rooms of Cocaine Anonymous and his mouthy sidekick Sarah met hers too, but they weren’t interested in looking for the similarities…. just the differences. They set to intimidating me and others whose jib, they thought, didn’t fit the rooms of CA.

Only yesterday another CA idiot told me his relationship with a woman (he also met in AA) was totally different from mine because his relationship was based on love. He inferred men together could never love each other. Good God! It’s like returning to the dark ages, these ghastly white trash with their old fashioned ideas of gay men, foreigners and the differently abled.

Nick Batchelor, when he is not spouting homophobic invective, described the older special needs guests at the building we share with other community groups: the Community Center in Marsham Street Maidstone as: ‘dribbling’, his verbal description accompanied by cruel gestures. A cheap laugh at the expense of the less fortunate. I made an official complaint about him there and at Maidstone CGL, The West Kent Drug & Alcohol Wellbeing Service on Mill Street. Both organisations were helpless to address my complaints because CA is an ‘anonymous programme’, they said, and therefore lawless. CA allows people like Nick to get away with expressing his extreme personal views in any inflammatory way he chooses.

When I shared about being gay in front of Nick, he replied, “I don’t care if you fuck animals.” That’s what we are dealing with, folks. Unbridled homophobia. Homophobes like Nick used to say, ‘I don’t care if you are gay as long as you don’t shove it down my throat’. And I thought that meant watch us kiss or hold hands or have campy voices, so I didn’t do any of those things. But it doesn’t. Shoving it down their throats means: if a gay man audaciously and shamelessly talks about his life and considers himself equal to someone like Nick Batchelor then he must be swiftly dealt with. Non compliant gay men, in Nick’s toxic masculine world, must know their place.

Nick insisted I was removed as the treasurer of our local CA convention if they wanted funding. Again citing my relationship with Joe, an adult man in CA, as an act of abuse. The simpering ‘head of CA Kent’ Lucy Britton called me, introducing herself as the Head of CA Kent, she admitted she too had a disastrous relationship with another Cocaine Anonymous member. She called to advise I should go to different meetings or stop going to meetings which is utterly contrary to everything the anonymous programe stands for. Calling me merely inflamed the situation ten fold. This is an organisation that claims to have ‘no leaders’. BULLSHIT!

An hour ago, things changed. I could not believe my luck. There was Nick’s ugly mug… on TV. This vile ex con has the audacity to claim he ‘helps youth’, of course he does! As long as they are not lgbt or differently abled. Look at his Linkedin caption. Should I judge him by his past? No. But his present needs scrutiny.

One young gay man came up to me and quietly admitted he was terrified of Nick but didn’t have anywhere else to go. CA was his last chance. One has to ask… why was Joe in the closet unless he felt intimidated? I uncover homophobia wherever I find it. I can smell it at 50 paces. If a man like Joe is in the closet it’s because he fears not being respected as a gay man… and with toxic males like Nick Batchelor running the show, who can blame him?

CA in Kent is a ghastly travesty run by a few sick souls who have barely scraped the surface of sobriety. Unable to stay clean, in and out of the rooms… people like Nick Batchelor lording it over them.

With fools like Nick Batchelor at the helm I have no hope for any of them.

Last Monday, adding to my general health woes, I woke at 2am with a strange and persistent pain in my upper belly. Pains I assumed were something to do with the polyps they removed from my colon during a colonoscopy the previous week or maybe the MRI the day before establishing the size of a tumour on my remaining adrenal gland.

On Monday at 9am I had a meeting in Canterbury with a mental health professional. I left the house in Whitstable at 7.30am. I couldn’t find a way of alleviating the discomfort. I sat on the loo. I sat in the car an hour early for my appointment, pain overwhelming me. I called the NHS help line. I was advised to take paracetamol and call my doctor in a day if things hadn’t improved.

An hour later I was on my back in an ambulance, a morphine drip in my arm. A mid line, not a cannula, they couldn’t find a vein. My blood pressure slumped. Three hours later, after vomiting a pint of yellow bile, I was taken into theatre, the anaesthetic a welcome relief. Not just for the immediate pain but all the pain, anguish and discomfort I had suffered this past year. I sank into the big black and just before I drifted away I thought to myself, perhaps for the first time ever, I wouldn’t mind if I never woke up.

I did not care about anything I previously cared about. I did not care about the welfare of the Little Dog. I did not care about my property. I wanted at that moment to slip away on a gurney in a grim Margate hospital. Margate on my death certificate. That was that.

I woke up in the Cheerful Sparrow, a ward of six men. All of them dishevelled, jaundiced, overweight. The man to my left entertaining a family of obese relatives. His eleven year old daughter the size of a small car. Her young face perched on a ledge of processed lard. To my right, a packet of ochre liquid stapled to his huge belly, a gruff male antagonized an ancient desiccated traveller laying opposite us. Confused by vascular dementia he called out in the night. Calling for long dead relatives. Calling for his dog.

At 5pm the following day Robin arrived in his Range Rover, driving me home to Whitstable. I slipped into his gracious car, black leather and reclining seats, protected from the smell of rotting cabbage Thanet seems unable to shake. Wearing imaginary dark glasses and a velvet wrap, feeling like Grace Kelly after the horrors of the Cheerful Sparrow Ward at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Margate.

Three days later my possessions arrived from the USA by hauler Bishop’s Move. As one might imagine… this was neither as simple nor as stress free as I wanted. However, it was one step further away from Tivoli NY and for that I am truly grateful. Bishop’s Move have a lot to answer for but we are just beginning to literally and figuratively unpack their disaster.

This past week, since my body waged war on me, I’ve been shown such kindness from friends I’ve known all my life. Cared for, fed by, driven to, held. I don’t need to remind you but if this had happened in the USA I would have been presented with a huge bill when I left the hospital and then my kindly Tivoli neighbours would have picked the pearls off my decaying body.

Which reminds me of the day my forty-something Tivoli neighbour Christopher Murphy (Village of Tivoli Trustee) fell off his bike directly in front of my house whilst performing stunts for his adolescent sons. Falling badly onto boiling hot tarmac where he lay until I found him. His hatred of gay people (or me) so profound he would not let me help him off the hot street. Schadenfreude prevailed. I looked down at him squirming like an injured possum until his equally sour wife arrived to help his sorry ass.

Lucy Ferry killed herself. A shot-gun in an Irish village. Her ‘beloved’ dogs present. Her death opening the door to a whole world of grief. In drawing rooms all over London, Palladian homes in the West Country, cottages in Norfolk… pearls were clutched, brows furrowed.

The moment I heard the terrible news I called Simon Finch. We gasped in horror. Oh no. No. There was nothing more to say. Lucy Ferry/Birley née Helmore was dead.

I met Lucy with Isabella Blow. Mischievous Isabella, she’d say, “Lucy only married Bryan to save the Helmore family house.” By the time I met Lucy she was already separated from Bryan. We had tea often at that saved Kensington home. A short walk from where I lived on Adam and Eve Mews. “Oh, hello.” She looked a little confused. As if my visit had slipped her mind, as if life were happening to her rather than being fully present. That sweet smile.

Sometimes the younger of her four boys were in the house, rattling around upstairs, but we sat on our own. She didn’t have to be Lucy Ferry with me. She was just another addict talking it through. Another bozo on the bus… as they used to say at AA/NA meetings in Hudson NY. Just one addict helping another, working the steps. Even so, she was never a great believer in God… but I bet she called out for him just before she pulled the trigger.

We had dinner at Floriana on Beauchamp Place, pretending to be a couple, mainly her idea to annoy Bryan. Hosted by Tatler, 19 Mar 2003. The Evening Standard wrote a vile and libellous take down of yours truly after the prank. Gratifyingly, the writer of the piece (Deborah Orr told me) died painfully and suddenly a few months later. I wasn’t moved by his death, nobody remembers his name… as people remember and are moved by Lucy.

Isabella read the piece in the Standard, refusing to understand the humour. She summoned me to Prada on Bond St. I met her in the dressing room, pulling a jewelled frock over flesh-colored, boned underwear. She screamed, “What were you thinking? Lucy would never have a relationship with someone like YOU!”

“Issy! You were there. You knew it was a prank!”

“It wasn’t very funny.” She gasped as the sales associate zipped her into the gown.

The dinner at Floriana was thrown for Lee McQueen. Michael Portillo and Isabella Blow sat either side of me. Prince Michael of Greece opposite. Lucy was setting me up with Lee but we weren’t interested. We were interested in Lucy. If only gay boys had Lucy’s charm and spunk. 4 years later Isabella would drink poison and die, a year after that… Lee would hang himself.

This week Bella Freud, Jasper Conran, Patrick Kinmonth amongst so many others posted sad obituaries on Instagram. Conran, a picture of Lucy from his wedding. Kinmonth, a tiny dead bird by Craigie Aitchison. All of them wailing plaintively about their friend Lucy.

Why didn’t she call? Why was she on her own? Where were her friends? Her husband and children? Was she going to meetings? Did she have people who could help her live, make the decision to live? Obviously not.

Every addict wants to die sooner than God planned. It is a decision none want taking from us. The needle in the arm, the bottom of the glass, the cold gun.

Hamish Bowles’ piece in Vogue was mawkish and badly written. Painting pretty Lucy shaped pictures of a woman Hamish scarcely understood other than her frocks, hats and shoes. Of course, he didn’t ask why? Nobody is asking why. Is that too impertinent when you expect someone you know well to grow old? She would have made a very, very grand old lady. Rasping, funny and chic.

It’s a bit late, posting pretty black and white pictures of her on social media, Hamish.

Two weeks ago I managed to track her down. She was a little frosty, we hadn’t spoken for years. She asked if I was sober. We giggled about her brother Ed living it large at The Chateau Marmont in LA where I last saw him. We recalled the Floriana scam and the subsequent outrage. She wanted to know if I was in love. I told her about Jake and our disastrous relationship… I told her how overwhelming love can be. Crippling. I asked about her husband. There was a long, painful silence. She suddenly seemed wistful and bored. We made tentative plans to meet when she returned from her doomed vacation.

She wondered if I had ever received the green fur hat. Of course I had. Apparently, she had never received my written thanks.

Did she stop believing? Run out of dreams? Her children, dogs and husband could not convince her life was worth living. Did she stop loving dressing up, entertaining, preparing lavish dinners, being center of attention? Perhaps she saw the folly of her ways? Couldn’t align her feelings with the facts? Maybe she was drinking and convinced herself suicide a glamorous conclusion? God only knows.

I have lost more friends/acquaintances to suicide than any other disease these past 50 years. Suicide. Touching the lives of almost everyone I know. He lay on the tracks, he loaded the syringe, he hung himself from the banister, she jumped from the bridge, she blew her brains out in Ireland. They found him dead in the car park, Boxing Day. He was badly decomposed. He stole pills from the hospital. I knew all these people.

Yesterday I met Rosie Duffield, the MP for Canterbury and Whitstable. She was half an hour late for our appointment. Her train was late. The taxi wasn’t where they expected it to be. She runs into the meeting berating the train and the tube. Rosie is a slight, blond woman who, against all the odds beat long time conservative MP Julian Brazier with a slim 186 majority in a constituency that never had a Labour MP since voting began.

I congratulated her, “You must be very grateful to Jeremy Corbyn,” I said.

Rosie smiled, she seemed baffled when people told her on the stump they were voting for Jeremy and not her. “I heard that all the time,” she said. I pressed her to admit it was Jeremy who had energised the Labour vote in a traditionally conservative area but she was reluctant to agree Jeremy Corbyn was the reason she had her seat in parliament. I asked her if she was a ‘blairite’, she replied candidly, “I owe everything to Tony Blair.”

She whispered conspiratorially, “Jeremy’s nearly 70, you know.” As if telling a 58-year-old it’s all over for someone who is 69, all over for Jeremy Corbyn. I was beginning to understand who Rosie Duffield is and where her allegiances lay. I looked carefully into her eyes. “We need someone younger.” she says.

I wanted to meet Rosie Duffield to find out if she was adequately representing her LGBT constituents. So, I started our meeting by asking Rosie if she had ever heard of Rudolf Brazda. She hadn’t. Rudolf, the last holocaust survivor to wear a pink triangle, held at Buchenwald. I asked if she knew what a pink triangle signified. She nodded her head cautiously as if she were searching for a memory. I explained who Rudolf was and how his and other LGBT inmates were remembered in oral histories archived at the New York Holocaust museum.

Their stories are desperate, they tell how badly they were treated by both inmates and guards. Beaten, murdered by guards and inmates. Treated like pedophiles are treated in prisons today. I told her how, when the camps were liberated, the gay men were not set free but taken to prison by British and American liberators. These gay men, I reminded her, are my family of origin. Murdered in the concentration camps by both nazis and fellow inmates.

Rosie shifts in her seat uncomfortably.

I let her know my own history of dealing with homophobia in Whitstable, the daubing of homophobic slurs on my house, bricks through the windows and more recently being verbally assaulted by a homophobic public house land lady. Rosie seemed genuinely pained by my description. Rosie and her manager offered to speak to Jonathan Neame about the homophobia in his pubs. I accepted their offer graciously.

I wondered what Rosie Duffield’s definition of homophobia was? She mumbled she didn’t have one. I wondered why? Why hadn’t The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defined homophobia like they defined anti-Semitism? After all, we were there too. We… the LGBT community stood behind those terrible chain link fences walking with the dead and dying. Where was our definition of homophobia? A definition the party could work with?

Religion is a choice, sexuality is not.

I asked her if she thought Jeremy Corbyn was anti semitic and a racist.

Rosie wanted me to know her fiancé is black, that she couldn’t possibly understand what it is like to be black, gay or jewish. She had to accept as the truth from her jewish friends if they were convinced Jeremy was anti-Semitic… she had no option but to believe them. I asked if she was ’empathetically challenged’? She became angry and told me she would ask me to leave if I spoke to her like that. She told me I was being rude.

“You mean… rude like Margaret Hodge was to Jeremy Corbyn?” Rosie told me she was a ‘Very good friend of Margaret Hodge’. I asked Rosie if I had called her a fucking homophobe would she ask me to leave the office. She told me Margaret Hodge had every right to shout at Jeremy because she was a jewish woman who had lost family in the holocaust.

I reminded her again. My family of origin also perished in the holocaust. Gay men without children, abandoned by their family for being gay. Who could possibly claim these men (sex perverts) as their relatives? It is incumbent upon men like me, willing to claim men like Rudolf as my own family, wrought from the history of lgbt oppression.

I asked again, “Where is the IHRA definition of homophobia?”

The definition of Anti Semitism has become the stick by which people like Margaret Hodge and her friend Rosie Duffield beat Jeremy Corbyn. Yet, as a gay man, when I want answers about her understanding of homophobia Rosie tells me her definition of homophobia is ‘common sense’.

Religion is a choice. Sexuality is not.

Rosie stumbled into admitting she was Roman Catholic. “A church riven by homophobia,” I say. “Religious people are not my friends Rosie, they have delivered a history of violent rebuke against LGBT people. Refusing to recognise our most basic human rights.” What are you going to do about the pockets of homophobia in the Anglican Church? You are, after all, the MP who represents the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Religious people are not our friends. Jews. Christians. Muslims. There are still passages in the Torah, Bible and Koran demanding death for practicing gay men. Why haven’t these passages been removed? When will Jews, Christians and Muslims remove passages from the Torah Bible and Koran that incite violence toward LGBT people? Legitimizing LGBT intolerance? When would she call for homophobia to be erased in all religions.

Rosie looked aghast.

The problem with Rosie? She’s a delightful, simple person. Her politics are scarcely evolved. Rosie isn’t ‘woke’. She probably didn’t expect to win her seat. Her understanding of her LGBT constituents is scant. It’s not her fault, she doesn’t ‘get’ how important historically the Labour Party was to LGBT people during the hostile 1960’s – 1980’s because she can’t imagine walking a mile in our shoes.

The meeting ended. A nervous looking latino man waiting in the lobby wanted to talk about Brexit. He was sitting with his daughter. I set off into the searing heat.

On the way home to Whitstable I felt shaken and slightly bullied. I’d experienced only a fraction of what is currently tearing at the heart of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Rosie is our existential threat. She exemplifies how Tony Blair snatched control from working people and handed power to a few entitled white folk.

Rosie has an agenda shared by many of her Blairite colleagues: to unseat Jeremy Corbyn. For those of us who believe passionately in Corbyn’s inclusive vision for our country it was inconsiderate of her to say she had no clue what the lives of gay, black or jewish people could be because she wasn’t black, jewish or gay.

I wondered how Rosie could possibly see past her white, christian heterosexuality to represent any minority? Me? The anxious latino man? The truth is, Rosie is not motivated to represent her constituents. Rosie is not interested in the lives of her constituents. Rosie is obsessed with regime change. She spends her time berating and bullying Jeremy Corbyn. She has no interest in me or indeed real instances of homophobia she is instead obsessed with politicised examples of anti-Semitism.

In 40 years I had never bothered to meet my Member of Parliament, then Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of The Labour Party. Even though I voted for Thatcher in ’78 and Blair in 1997 I never joined a political party. I have since joined the Labour Party because of Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Party is the biggest political party in Europe because of Jeremy Corbyn.

The Labour Party needs MP’s who represent not only its 800,000 voting members but the millions of disaffected Britons who believe in radical change… sadly, for the constituents of Whitstable and Canterbury Rosie Duffield isn’t one of them.

Another morning at the hospital. Another biopsy on another lump. I’m quite sweaty today. My arms hurt. The arthritis in my neck makes my arms painful, numb and tingling. The pain increases when I cough, sneeze or strain.

After the consultant I drove to Margate where I met Jonathan Viner who has famously bought the huge Margate Print Works, partially selling to Tracey Emin and others. We ate a light lunch at David Liddicot‘s cafe on Union Row. Jonathan rather sweetly paid for lunch, (£20). Of course we discussed both projects. He is unsurprisingly proprietorial about Margate. Viner, I suppose, rediscovered it and put his money where his mouth is.

He very kindly walked me around the last remaining part of the huge building still unsold. The cavernous concrete space ripe for something magnificent. We discussed Brexit, we discussed moving to Kent, we chatted briefly about Jay. He is obviously quite competitive but not in an overwhelming, American way. I told Jonathan I’d met the ghastly Margate based architect Sam Causer who has all the charm of untreated sewage.

We discussed terrible Margate landlords who want too much for their properties and he was eager to remind me I didn’t own anything in Margate… yet. I replied gently that if my idea fell through it wouldn’t be the end of the world. I learned from buying at auction… there’s always something else, next time. It’s not healthy to obsess about things. It can get you into trouble. God has a plan. I just have to listen out for it.

I’ve been going to London meetings. NA meetings. It baffles me how people stay clean. But of course… they don’t. The real addicts die. NA, divorced from Bill’s radical idea of a spiritual solution, is utterly worthless. I am irritated by NA in the UK, the group therapy, feelings laid bare. I was sharing step solution in a Chelsea meeting last week and a young woman in the meeting told me I shouldn’t talk about the steps because she found it ‘triggering’.

Meanwhile Chip, my friend in NYC, who worked a solid NA programme overdoses and dies. He was a splendid, handsome father of one. Divorced from God there was no other destiny for him. Jail. Institutions. Death.

The Whitstable Biennial opened this week. Consequently there is ‘art’ everywhere: in beech huts, coffee shops, fishmongers, gardens, St Alphage church on the high street. The art is pretty dull but the buzz around town is great. I found two gorgeous bronze figures tucked away in a shed by sculptor Mark Fuller who is without doubt a bloody genius. £80.

If my arms work I may go to Canterbury Pride this evening.

Ivan Cartwright visited me last weekend. We had lunch at Dave Brown’s then drove to Margate. He had never been. He was very impressed. Lunch with M&J at well reviewed Angela’s in Margate on Wednesday. I ate Turbot and some odd tasting greens.

Met in Soho last week with a gentleman who wants to buy my art collection, then a brief but good catch up with my producer. I bumped into Johnny and Julian outside Maison Bertaux. We drank a little coffee and I scoffed a large Mont Blanc, you know the one… with mashed up marrons glacés, meringue and cream.

I travelled from Whitstable to London on the train. It was exactly the same time to get up there as it was 40 years ago. It’s perfectly fine. The bus from Victoria to Piccadilly Circus was wonderful. Swinging past the Wellington Arch, on the upper deck, very little traffic. The trees around Green Park and Park Lane have matured beautifully. Apsley house now looks like it’s sitting in the countryside rather than a concrete island. I fell in love with London all over again. Who wouldn’t?

After lunch I took the Piccadilly line to Gloucester Place and had tea with Christophe. He looks wonderfully relaxed after his hip operation. Pain shows in the face, you know. Without the pain he looks marvellous. “Everybody says the same,” he smiled.

There was a coach from Faversham to Whitstable after 11pm but so what? A drunk man on the bus was recounting his recent arrest for knocking someone out. I had no problem with the railway. I had no problem with the buses and the tube. I’ve had no problems with the NHS. I just wish the pins and needles would stop.

I have found writing this blog almost impossible these past few months. Impossible to write the first line. I could say, ‘Margate, I’m obsessed with you.’ Or, ‘The lilacs fill the air with a sweet and heavy scent.’ I could tell you some unrelated facts, like I reported some fool to the police for a vile hate crime. Or, I have my own cup at the deli or… I’m so tired I can scarcely get through the day. My body failing, spinning out of control, my voice slurring, my head aching, my memory shot to pieces.

I wrote my will. I left everything to one person. I’m glad it’s done.

The Little Dog shivers then ravenously eats. He has a chewable heart pill at morning and dusk. He sleeps close to my leg. I spend too much time looking at my phone. Dude smells pungent… sweet and sour. I bathed him today. The water was cold. It wasn’t Malibu grooming. Even though we have hot, sunny days it hardly compares to California. He looks forlornly up at me. His perky ears all bent and fragile.

The Ross on Wye project is frustrating yet rewarding. I should have ignored the neighbours and just gotten on with the project. An exercise in Little England. Foolishly thought I should reach out to them, reach out to the fearful white people who live on the hill. The sort of people who believe everything they read on the internet. The sort of people who believe Jeremy Corbyn can’t win an election.

I’m living in a country where the press has all but given up telling the truth. Lies splashed over the broadsheets. The BBC, once believed unquestionably, now feeds off the rotting carcass of what was its esteemed impartiality. The stench is difficult to ignore.

Rudolf Brazda died in 2011. We was the last man alive to have worn the pink triangle. The pink triangle was the crude badge gay men were forced to wear in the concentration camps differentiating us from other inmates. Visible from long distances the pink triangle was used as target practice by the Nazis. LGBT inmates, considered sex criminals, were also murdered by their fellow jewish inmates. LGBT people experienced terrible persecution from the jews in the camps.

Why?

Remember these two facts (seldom admitted by Zionists) about our LGBT history.

Firstly, when we arrived at the concentration camps, LGBT people were considered nonces, disgusting sex offenders and treated as pedophiles are treated today in jails all over the world… like useless scum. Secondly, when the camps were liberated by the American and the British armed forces LGBT, inmates were not allowed to leave. They were taken from the camps directly to jail.

When I mentioned these facts last Holocaust Memorial Day my jewish friends were outraged. They hate being reminded of these pertinent truths. They are deeply offended when gay people remind the world of our history of persecution.

Another month has passed since I last wrote.

Since then part of The Goods Shed in Canterbury burned down, my friend Susanna valiantly opening the doors and serving food the day after. M and B have gone to France leaving me alone in their house. I have filled the fridge with food. My trips to the hospital are frequent but manageable. The Margate project inches toward completion, the Ross house stalls then splutters into gear.

My routine is unshakable. I sit with the others outside the Deli on Harbour Street but only when the bitter tradesman have gone to toil. I walk the dogs on West Beech then feed them raw chicken and a little kibble. I spend a lot of time with PG and her grown up children. Last weekend we explored the magnificent gardens at Great Dixter then ate ice cream in Hastings. Every so often I drive on my own to Ross and look at the land, the undergrowth is relentless and desperate to once again consume the old stone threshing barn even the neighbours didn’t know existed.

Occasionally I dip into my old LA life and endure meetings in London with producers. Rather surprisingly I’ve been asked to direct a movie in January. We will see how that pans out. My mind is open to failure and success… if they support me I might very well make a good job of it. We sit on the roof of that club in Shoreditch and watch trim 30 something male executives dip in and out of the swimming pool. Their bodies glistening, perfectly groomed.

After a few weeks of being home in Whitstable my relations with old friends, grown frail by distance and insecurity, have strengthened and renewed. Yet, I was recently forced to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth. Even though I lived and worked in the USA for well over a decade and made friends with those immediately in my orbit… I never cared for any of them. Most of them were simply there. I didn’t care for their well-being. Nobody really cares for their neighbour in the USA. Not like we do for the folk I have known nearly 60 years. I really care about Sue at The Tea Rooms and Ronnie saving me from a parking ticket. I love walking to The Battery and drinking tea with Marilyn and John. I am passionate about Marianne, Bob and their children. We sat beside the cherry tree remembering their son Richard who vanished from the Dover/Calais ferry and is presumed dead.

Whoever it is, however fractious they are… whatever they may have said in the past, I feel a love for them that was absent from my life in the USA. I am so grateful for all of them. I am grateful for their love and their hate because that’s what LIFE is all about… a life lived fully and squarely on life’s terms.

Grown in a poor brown woman whose name attorneys erased. She’ll never be known to the unborn child.

Goldman bonus spent on more Botox. Calm your troubled brow with restylane. Fill the lines they put there with relentless bullying and casual homophobia.

You weren’t looking for love. A painted finger nail emoji on your Tinder profile, hoping for a merger and acquisition. Perfect in the Pines. Helping him fuck another guy. Guiding him into the gaping hole like a stallion. Prepped and raw. Bare back monkey.

Hung?

Fun?

Can Accom.

Marrying a fellow American now, you need not stress, ICE officers will not be your groomsman. Not today.

Thank Jesus Christ Almighty,

Clinton’s Defense of Marriage Act is no more.

They can not stop you, nor turn you from the hospital as your husband lays dying from a lethal Fentanyl overdose. Undetectable. No longer woke.

Found in the sauna, wearing his combat boots, multiply penetrated, cream pied, still bound and dripping, eyes open, calling out another man’s name, swaying gently in the black polyester sling.

Enjoying your honeymoon in the leather bars of Berlin.

1.

They are deporting thousands of undocumented workers in the USA. Friends and family disappear. The cranberry bogs remain un-harvested. The schools stricken by grieving children. Police officers didn’t think it would be this way. They couldn’t put a face to the men and women Trump wanted to deport. Simple, honest people caught up in the merciless trawl. They didn’t realise their friends were breaking the law. They didn’t understand the depth of hatred their fellow citizens harboured for brown and black people.

2.

Hackney. East London finally puts paid to the ridiculous notion I can leave my car unlocked without being burgled. Yes. I am that man. Regardless of the stolen cash, life in East London is inspiring. Like the first time you visit deep Brooklyn, you understand who millennials are and what they prioritize. Bushwick, going there with Paris McGarry and her boyfriend Tom. The streets were buzzin, the restaurants overflowing, the music bursting out of every window over the cobbled streets. Huge lofts once filed with machinery now house tech aspirants and what, I think, is the difference? Intellectual rather than mechanical industry.

Hackney has exactly the same energy. Fit, bearded men cycling through the park discussing crypto currency on their cell phones. They look insane, talking to themselves, eyes fixed on the road, avoiding my dogs who are inexplicably drawn to cycle paths. I feel alive here, which is odd as I am facing death head on right now. I am optimistic even though I feel the curtain closing about me, taking my final bow. I sit in Shorditch House all day drinking water and coffee and eating sour jelly candy. I buy boots in APC and wonder why. I mean, I don’t need anything. I am rootless, I am free.

3.

Going to NA meetings all over the East End. I am drawn to the drama I suppose. I meet cool people and when they read about me are less eager to judge my life, my exploits whilst American addicts damn you forever. You lose your grip once and Americans watch with glee as you fall from the side of the building. Falling like a crazy base jumper. You took a risk… it didn’t pay off. Your fingers slip from the polished marble. The English addict is less determined to make you pay.

However, NA is not very productive in London. The people may be kind but the programme stinks. Swimming around in their own shit. NA isn’t group therapy. Nobody cares about your feelings. Addicts repeat their using tragedies again and again day after day. They have no solution, grasping hold of their pain, reliving the insanity, indulgently spewing over anyone who will listen. They attend endless meetings 90/90 but will not work the 12 steps. Of course, after a few months, they relapse then after another spectacular ‘rock-bottom’ claw their way back into the rooms… continuing the cycle of despair. I keep reminding myself not to slip back into bad habits. No catastrophic thinking, no indulgence. No. No. No.

4.

I’m in Climpson’s the local coffee shop trying to write a treatment. Broadway Market. I know the fishmonger and the book seller. The baristas know my name. I’m writing a gay Fatal Attraction. Crazy older lady meets younger gay guy at AA meeting, she’s a hoarder, he takes pity on her, cleans her house, helps her with her life, she lends him money and falls in love with him… then tries to destroy him when he refuses her advances. It’s waiting to be written. This story, this slice of life upstate. Donna, you crazy witch! I took Donna to a gay party, she wasn’t impressed when I talked to the other guys. I took her to Abby Rockefeller’s farm. She wasn’t impressed when I talked to other women. I felt her eyes boring into me. We left.

5.

The dull thud returns, at the base of my sternum. The pain wraps around my body from my stomach to the base of my back. The acid reflux, overwhelming tiredness and irritability. I had more tests. There are problems that need resolved but the doctors are too damn eager to slice into me. I already had my gall bladder and an isolated tumor on my adrenal gland removed.

The doctor is thorough and uncompromising. I revisit all the horrors of pancreatic cancer. I look at potential remedies, of which there are few. The very worst scenario is called the Whipple procedure which is also known as a pancreaticoduodenectomy, a complex operation to remove the head of the pancreas, the first part of the small intestine (duodenum), the gallbladder and the bile duct.

They say to me: these symptoms are found in women. They say, it may be malignant, it may be benign, it may be somewhere in between. The diagnosis isn’t good enough. It’s too damn vague. I lay on my bed after our long walk and fall into a deep sleep. I breathe deeply, clearing my mind of everything I think I know. I remind myself of the solution, the literature. I say, what will be will be. Divorcing myself from self-pity, dishonest or self-seeking motives.

During the day I face indecision. I may not correctly determine which course of action to take. I ask God for inspiration, an intuitive thought or decision. I relax, I don’t struggle. I’m surprised by how often the right answer comes after practicing these principles in all my affairs.

Mario Testino was a friend of ours. He had a studio in an abandoned hospital on Soho Square. Scott Crolla, Georgina Godley and others were frequent guests. My boyfriend in 1981 was Mario’s long time friend and collaborator Patrick Kinmonth.

Patrick lived in a tiny apartment in Holland Park, deliberately disheveled, dusty yet filled with beautiful object. The place was brutally cold in the winter and a furnace in the summer. Patrick, according to the artist Craigie Aitchison dobbed me in to the police when they were looking for me to ask questions about my credit card and why I hadn’t paid the bill. It was Patrick who lent me money to buy my Peter Doig and it was Patrick who encouraged me to make art. He was a vicious snob, exquisitely beautiful and at that time worked for Vogue magazine. He amused us all by mimicking Mario’s Peruvian lilt. Patrick is a deft impersonator. The problem with Patrick? Nothing ever came of his own talent. He lives with the painfully shy food photographer Tessa Traeger in the West Country. He designs opera sets for out-of-the-way operas but never became the great anything everyone thought he might become.

The last time I saw Mario and Patrick we were in LA at The Chateau Marmont. I was having dinner in the garden they were having a party in the lounge with a bunch of gorgeous boy/men models. I sat beside Patrick for a moment but I didn’t stay long. He enjoys scolding me. I made amends for some indiscretion and left. Mario looked at me disdainfully. Patrick enjoys being on Mario’s winning team. He wrote the forward to Mario’s book and he styles the most interesting shoots. Neither of them wanted me hanging around. You’ve seen pictures of young girls on a yacht wearing bikinis, oggled by old men? This was Mario’s gay equivalent. I’d already ruined things by talking to him and Patrick, bathed in Mario’s reflected glory, wanted me gone. He looked down his aquiline nose and told me I could have made so much more of myself. Yeah, I thought… if you hadn’t worked with the establishment to destroy me. I probably could.

You know why old men put young girls on yachts? You’d think… so the girls can’t escape. No, it’s so their old men friends can’t join the party. I returned to my dinner in the garden. Soon I saw Mario, Peter Pan like… screaming and laughing down the stairs with his crew. Patrick lagging behind like a heavy train on an old dress.

I’ve never written about Mario. Now, within the context of the salacious revelations and accusations leading to his spectacular firing from the Conde Nast creative family I revisit my association with him. Let me say immediately, I didn’t know anything untoward was happening. I had never heard anything. The towel series he shot with models were obviously designed to get the model naked and to legitimize Mario’s pervy intentions but I never heard from models who worked with him they felt uncomfortable.

Many of those same models who worked with Mario were not so discreet about their working relationship with Bruce Weber. For a decade or more I heard story after story from young men who had worked with Bruce and the discomfort they felt being ‘relaxed’ with his hands on their bodies, the ‘breathing exercise’ or asked to take off their shorts when they were alone with Bruce. I heard again and again about the notorious ‘private archive’ for which Bruce said he wanted their naked picture. I heard how he tantalized young men with lucrative campaigns and the promise of a life beyond their wildest dreams. I heard how he set models against each other, how within minutes of the private naked shots… would change his mind about the campaign promise he’d made, playing with them, manipulating them.

Yet, it seems, many models were perfectly happy to have their bodies used by Bruce. Yesterday I spoke to a male super model I know in NYC. Last year, after a few drinks, he described in detail how Bruce molested him, removed his underwear and taken pictures of him naked. I asked if he was willing to come forward, speak publicly. He told me I should be ashamed of myself for suggesting he told tales on Bruce. Thus we understand how Bruce, inspiring loyalty in others, groomed them for sexual molestation.

I’ve had my run ins with Bruce over the years. I asked him to take the Dorian Gray portrait. He curtly suggested that I wasn’t the sort of person he could do business with. Oh… how the tables have turned.

Sunday. I had a late lunch in Hackney with a young gay artist. We talked about Mario and Bruce. He asked the difference between flirtation and harassment. Worried his flirtation might be misconstrued. How would he know? Of course, one asks ones self: why doesn’t he know? He’s a bright lad but his white male privilege is so ingrained he cannot differentiate between the two. He asked if the men now making complaints were somehow complicit. Many gay men make excuses for Bruce and Mario habitually devaluing our lives by suggesting the men who agree to work or consort with us are suspect or complicit. We remain baffled by the notion of consent. They knew what they were getting themselves into.

We talk about the abuse of power between men (beyond top and bottom although that too) and how our anti social behaviour and lack of morality has been largely ignored by heterosexual society firstly before equality, because straight people found it distasteful and didn’t really care. Then, after equality straight people were too embarrassed or confused to question how we lived in case they were accused of homophobia or insensitivity. Recent gay celebrity scandals have shocked many of our straight allies, realizing they don’t know anything much about their gay friends at all. Like rats we live discreet and cautious lives just a few feet from theirs, scurrying from one assignation to another.

We’ve done a great job passing. For many years the only evidence we existed? When the police arrested, tried and sent us to jail for being gay. Cottaging. Tricking. Dressing up. Without these occasional mentions in the newspapers our gay lives would remain completely invisible. I broke the law simply by being born, alive and sexually active. Straight acting wasn’t a fetish, it was a survival strategy… saving a young man from a beating or death. Ironically, this parallel life served many of us very well. As a young British gay man I enjoyed social mobility, sexual freedom and access to extraordinary financial opportunities my straight peers could only dream of. Yet, I paid the price for all of those benefits by surrendering my moral imperative.

Paris Hilton is maligned in the press for saying gay men on gay hook up apps are ‘disgusting’. Which, after being sent 50 or so asshole pics this week… one might be inclined to agree.

With equality comes responsibility. Some fought hard to enjoy marriage equality. We fought hard in the UK to have homophobic laws like section 28 overturned. In the UK these laws were ratified in Parliament and are hard to revoke. We are tentatively exploring a new moral landscape. Morals defined by heterosexuals, most gay men are unprepared for these changes and how this shift toward ‘normalcy’ may affect our lives. Simply, our lifestyle compared with that of the average heterosexual may not bear scrutiny post Weinstein and Mario, Bryan, Bruce and Kevin may just be the very tip of the iceberg.

Entitled, affluent gay white men are especially morally impoverished. Many still live secret, compartmentalized and shameful lives blighted by addiction, alcoholism and mental illness. To many straight people we may seem carefree, highly entertaining, a cause to celebrate ‘gay pride’ and drink rainbow cocktails… but, on our own with our second screens we indulge less salubrious, secret lives using hook up apps as the portal, through which many enter a dark and disgusting world of chem sex, lies, cheating and despair.

They say, everyone lies on-line. We live in lying times. Acceptable lies are now morally ring fenced. The lies most gay men tell before they come out are perfectly… acceptable. A habit we are loathed to break. Most gay men are addicted to lying. Only yesterday I met a closeted 25-year-old gay man. I asked him why he was in the closet? He described the same feelings of shame and despair I felt nearly 40 years ago. Some things never seem to change… however much I am told, ‘it doesn’t matter, nobody cares’. I explained to him why he needs to come out of the closet. He needs to stop lying. The more he lies the less respect he will have for the truth. As I mentioned in my previous blog gay men get into nasty habits around the truth and the sooner we embrace the truth the less damage is done to our morality and our integrity.

The last time I saw Mario he was skipping like a teenager down the stairs at The Chateau Marmont surrounded by beautiful teens. Like Peter Pan, a 60-year-old man unable to face the truth about his failing body and his failing ability to make good decisions. He could not stop himself grabbing them by the pussy. He is the same as Trump. Made of the same stuff. Gripped by power, fame and entitlement he understood himself to be unassailable. Nothing would ever bring him down… his legacy would glitter in perpetuity. The dream maker, the fantasist, the story-teller… the liar. Conjuring a universe of beauty, Mario forsook a life of loving relationships for an abuse of power.

Anna Wintour, who I confronted publicly about her reticence to stand up to Weber, made this statement last week.

Today, allegations have been made against Bruce Weber and Mario Testino, stories that have been hard to hear and heartbreaking to confront. Both are personal friends of mine who have made extraordinary contributions to Vogue and many other titles at Condé Nast over the years, and both have issued objections or denials to what has emerged. I believe strongly in the value of remorse and forgiveness, but I take the allegations very seriously, and we at Condé Nast have decided to put our working relationship with both photographers on hold for the foreseeable future.

Of course Anna Wintour is torn, it is hard to align what she hears and what she knows of her friends Mario and Bruce. She is rightfully appalled, but thankfully she doesn’t know the half of it… she merely glimpsed, very briefly into the dark heart of every gay man I know.

There is something lost and broken about a small town. Not on its surface. Beneath, where the new working class flex what little muscle it has. Withered by austerity and the banking crisis, lifting their weary faces and skinny fists toward the last of the watery sunlight.

Whitstable has always attracted freaks and frauds. Crooks and drifters. Before the gang of yummy mummies arrived with their plantation shutters, gumming up local stores with giant strollers… gangsters sat in Wheelers back room making deals. Far enough from London, close enough to get home for their tea.

Life is evenly divided between Whitstable my home town and the world I created elsewhere. You know, in the newspapers and on TV. To come home is a mixed blessing. My estranged brothers and frail mother have become litigants rather than family as I sue for my part in David’s will.

Even though Whitstable is a very small town one can totally miss seeing someone for decades. Yet, with very little effort, I saw my mother on the street. She looked animated, mid conversation with other mothers, presumably after dropping my nephew Oscar Roy at school. Frances Roy, Frances Spark, Fran. I don’t know what she calls herself nowadays. I walked closer, I tapped her on the shoulder… she turned to face me. I was shocked by how badly she has aged. The face I once adored is now smeared over her large skull, her features drawn, jowls and ear lobes drooping like melting tallow.

I was momentarily pleased to see her. I felt protective once again. I wanted to reassure her things were going to work out. I thought the violent abuse we received from David would somehow bond us forever. Sadly, she has never been anything other than utterly selfish. She may have once but now she no longer wants the best for me. I am a stranger to her.

Unplanned pregnancy, shame and derision have shaped who she is today. She learned nothing from her own story. She never made amends. She was never proud or encouraging of any of her children. The older we got the less interest she showed. She had no ambition, no desire, no love.

I used to make excuses for her. I’d tell therapists, “The nuns at the mother and baby home made her life miserable.” I explained to psychologists, “Her father was cruel, her mother insensitive.” “It was a different time.” “When she looks at me I reminded her of him.” I said. And all the while, unbeknownst to her, the world was changing. She told the doctor at the hospital, when I later read the notes, she was ashamed of me being so obviously gay… a gay child. The sight of me flouncing around upset David.

They tried to shut me down. The harder they tried the harder I fought back. They tried to cure me with anti psychotic drugs. They gave an 11-year-old gay child, badly abused at home… anti psychotic drugs.

I protected her from what others might say. I melted when she cried. She used her tears to avoid the truth. Any difficult subject… she would cry. One day I told her the crying wasn’t working. I wasn’t going to cry with her anymore. She stopped crying. She didn’t do it again. My mother does not deserve my protection. Sooner or later we are all owed the truth.

I was 22, I had a show in the West End. She didn’t take the train, she didn’t see the play. She couldn’t be anything other than embarrassed, four gay men talking about our gay lives. She didn’t see me at the Edinburgh Festival, she didn’t see me. She had excuses.

The next show, The Host performed in the Oyster Company great hall, my mother came with her sister Margaret and giggled in the back row ruining it for other people. She didn’t come to the ICA or Sadler’s Wells, she didn’t come to The Hen and Chickens. I don’t think she said a word when I won my place at a prestigious film school. To this day and to the best of my knowledge she has never seen any of my films.

I’ve never written about her in this blog, explored who she is or was. I never once described her casual homophobia. I wanted to believe she was a better person than she actually is. A better person than me. But she wasn’t… she accused my boyfriends of being gold diggers, made gay slurs about AIDS and ‘disgusting gay diseases’. She failed to ask about my relationships, my work and my life. When Joe and I bought a Porsche I was excited to show her.

She looked at it and said, “You ponce.”

That is the sort of woman she is. Yet, when she was homeless I let her have one of our homes… even though she was the one who walked out on David… taking nothing. Like so many women, she left it behind. She walked out on my inheritance.

I have loyally hidden her true nature. In the film AKA I did not reveal she colluded with my abusive father. I continually let her off the hook.

When she called to tell me my brothers had been sent to prison, she blamed the police, she blamed everyone but them. My brother Martin Roy sends an abusive note to my lawyer. I do not read it. He storms into the solicitor’s office and demands to see him.

Whitstable High Street. She’s nicely dressed. I tap her on the shoulder and say hello. She looks shocked. She looked beaten. She holds onto her friend, she links arms… as if I am going to be rip her away from them. I ask if we can have coffee. She shakes her head and looks like she might cry. “I don’t want to talk to him.” The other mothers try encouraging her to have coffee with me. They advise her to talk it through but my Mother dare not do that because she has been lying so long… she knows if she accepts a coffee it is time to tell the truth.

Her friends say, “She speaks so highly of you.”

“Really?” I reply. “She scarcely speaks to me at all.”

I ask them if my mother Frances Roy mentioned to them she did not tell me my father was dying of cancer, she did not tell me he had died and then concealed his funeral from us all. She grips hold of the other woman frantic, terrified. Her brain racing for a solution. Fear. I return to the car. She runs up the street as fast as her 73-year-old legs can carry her.

2.

New Years Eve we sat in a small group in his sitting room. Whitstable people. An MBE, an artist, the celebrity gardener, the Michelin star chef, the academy award nominee and a couple of imported diplomats… friends of our host. He is wearing a djellaba. Black linen, a rust colored silk shawl and Saudi slippers. At midnight we toast the new year and hug. I check insta and snap chat. They are toasting in an ice palace in Reykjavik and the Sydney opera house. Sam Taylor Johnston posts random snaps of black men preparing her dinner and black men entertaining them with dancing.

The following day, New Years Day… we reconvene at Windy Corner Stores. At another table I see a man whose name I no longer remember, he has piercing blue eyes, he’s in a local band. I stare at him. He knows who I am. Like looking into the eyes of ones captor. Throughout my childhood this blue-eyed man mercilessly bullied me using gay slurs. I thought to myself, should I say something? He knows me. He knows what he did. I say nothing. I just stare.

A few days later I post this on the Overheard in Whitstable… Anything Goes, Facebook page.

Returning to Whitstable has been a positive experience. However, I’ve seen a few people around town who were openly and violently homophobic to me as I was growing up. I have never been ashamed of being gay and those who resorted to homophobia were the kind who resented ‘openly gay’ men, us who refused to be cowed by their hate. These people may now explain away their homophobia as a cultural phenomena but as with historical child abuse, historical homophobia must be answered to. Attitudes may have changed but the effects of homophobia should be acknowledged. If I see anyone in the town who was homophobic in my past I will remind them of their past cruelty. Most gay men in their 50’s either forsook marriage or children or waited until late in life. We lived through an aids epidemic. Whilst that was happening graffiti was written on the side of my house in island wall, it said: aids available here. LGBT people do not have to hide who we are and who we love. The privileged white men I have confronted so far claim they are the victim because I had the audacity to remind them of their hate. The homophobe, the racist, the misogynist is not the victim. Those who peddle hate must own it and make amends.

Of course, this note punctured Whitstable’s fragile, dark heart. I am harangued and homophobicly abused. Along side the homophobic abuse, energetic white people assure me nobody cares anymore if you are black, gay, fat… etc. As long as you keep quiet about it. If you complain… these illogicals demand you pipe down. It is still typical for white heterosexual people to shut down gay people who have the audacity to share their negative experience and challenge homophobia.

Of course, being a public figure I am used to the abuse. I have never been compliant.

I was most interested to hear from one commentator, Kris Howell. The rest: feckless female trolls, thin-lipped and spray tanned, their dyed hair in lank bangs. When I returned fire with equally vile invective they became outraged, like prodding a termites nest. The little termites ran around screaming.

For my amusement I suggested to one morbidly obese woman she may be in receipt of benefits. An excellent way to upset an oik. I found a picture of her wedding, her huge pink body wrapped up in acres of synthetic fabric. Her husband, pallid and inert. She told me she owned three cars. ‘You think I’d be on benefits with £70,000 worth of cars in front of my house.” It brought into sharp contrast just how different their world is from mine. I looked at my watch and smiled.

Kris Howell, better known as Les (ironically he also changed his name) caught my interest because once reeled in said exactly what I expected to hear. He wanted me to know he had bullied me not because I am gay… but because I am me.

He refused to differentiate between the two. As if the two could be separated.

Compliant homosexuals put up with being picked on, bullied, imprisoned and generally kicked around. They learn how to be invisible. Those of us who refuse to go quietly are branded difficult, hated for not keeping quiet. Other gay men who play the game as prescribed by straight white people are just as offended when a fellow gay rocks the boat. As the trolls railed and raged over my post the local gay hairdresser pinned his colors to their mast not realizing he had been co-opted into a seething pit of homophobes.

Les Howell refused, despite reasoned argument, to grasp that being gay had defined me, and I have good reason to be angry and better reason to fight back. How did a ten-year old me deal with being repeatedly called pooftah and bleached nigger at school? I was keenly aware of both racism and homophobia. We were taught by the vicar of St Alphage that the black boy sitting naked before Christ was a savage and would not know how to use a toilet. My uncle Norman confirmed this by pointing at black children, reminding me they were filthy savages.

Remember, even though homosexuality had been decriminalized by Woolfenden in 1965 gay men were still being arrested for consensual sex well into the 1980’s. I was born a criminal and I had every reason to be angry but that anger, as the years passed, turned me into something I would have preferred not to have been.

Yet, as Les Howell spewed his vitriol, so full of hate… like most enraged fools, he lost his grasp on reason. It was perfectly ok to remind the world of a man’s indiscretions he said, but not his triumphs. He told me he was law-abiding but balked when I reminded him both his friends Stuart and Martin Roy had been in prison for worse crimes than spending money on a credit card.

Like most fascists his argument have nothing to do with logic and what he may or may not think of me… and everything to do with who he is and the resentments he carries. Hate, like water, will find its level. It will seep into everything and rot where ever it remains.

He wanted me to know I was a liar. He said, “You were a liar before you went to prison and you’ve never learned your lesson.” I wondered what the lesson should be? And I thought, you know, lying is a particularly gay thing. I called Stephen Fry and we talked about gays and lying. The genesis of our fantastical lives. He had also gone to prison. He had stolen credit cards from other people, I had merely run up a huge bill on my own credit card. The difference? He would still have gone to prison in 2018, I would not.

Why do gay men lie? We lie to save ourselves. We lie until we come out of the closet. The longer we are in the closet the more we lie, the easier it becomes, there is no longer a taboo. The truth is negotiable.

The following day the trolls were chattering on-line like agitated chimps. Upset ’cause I had removed the thread. “Has he tagged you?” The wannabe silver back asks the girl with thin lips. He is holding up his metaphorical pool cue reminding everyone he won the argument. He won the fight. They talked cryptically about rinsing and reeling people in and unicorns. The woman in the synthetic wedding dress said she was sick of being maligned (my word not hers). A couple of them private messaged me in the hope I would re-engage.

Anything Goes’ on this Facebook site simply means: trolls and their dumb friends get to spew hate at anyone they feel they can bully and misinterpret, using xenophobia, misogyny, racism and homophobia as their weapons of choice. Their lives do not bear scrutiny. They are neither patriots nor evolved. They hide behind fake accounts because their truth is unbearable. They lie yet cannot bear anything but the truth in others, they insult but cannot stand being insulted.

They are kids in the school toilet. Writing notes and passing them around, scrawling over pictures, insulting who they believe are more vulnerable.

Dealing with the mass market can be very revealing. The British general public, like the woman in the white synthetic dress, are presently emboldened by Brexit.

3.

The following day I had tea with Barry Green at his hotel, The Continental. His son Richard was my best friend in the 80’s. We talked about Brexit. He told me he was a keen leaver and I asked him why. I’ve always respected Barry. I want somebody I respect to convince me Brexit is good for the country. I want to be wrong about Brexit. Barry Green was the second successful business owner, Susanna Atkins at The Goods Shed in Canterbury was the first, who came out to me as a stalwart brexiteer.

Actually George Wilson, our local Scottish millionaire, was the third but we didn’t get past talking planning permission.

I am fascinated by their Brexit. How it works for them? Susanna’s family (sons and cousins) had to bring in the harvest last year because they couldn’t get anyone to work on their farm. Susanna thought it was great, she suggested we all bring in the harvest. As it was, long ago. I could not imagine the sickly woman in the synthetic wedding dress on her knees in the fields. She might have a word or two to say about that when the local aristo land owner requisitions her, dragging her screaming from her smart phone, from Celebrity Big Brother on her giant flat screen… to pick asparagus for the 1%.

Barry told me he voted Brexit… he assured me not because of immigration (he is married to an Eastern European) but because of the common agricultural and fisheries policy. Ok, I said, so who is going to write the new agricultural and fisheries policy for the UK? Barry didn’t know what sort of policy or quota we would have after Brexit because he thought we might not have one at all.

“Do you think a free-for-all out at sea will work fine for our fisherman and fish stocks?” I inquired.

Both Susanna and Barry think the country will be best served by an army of artisans, baking bread, catching fish and selling our surplus to who ever wants to buy it. They believe their small-scale business model can be translated into something the whole country will adopt, setting the country free from the rest of the world. They crave autonomy, they crave sovereignty. They resent the rules, they want to catch what ever they want when they want it and bugger the cod stocks. They know what is best for the people if only we can return to simpler, less complicated ways. Bringing in the harvest with a new peasant class and take what we want from the sea as we need it.

Profit now, conservation later. They believe in the Dunkirk spirit. They believe the English will overcome adversity. An adversity we created for ourselves… we now delight in overcoming. Meanwhile the EU are preparing a no deal Brexit while our government prepare for nothing. Hurtling toward an arbitrary date when we fall gently off the cliff.

Barry Green sat on the brown leather Chesterfield whilst we chewed over the past. I congratulated him his success. He told me I was the kind of person who could have done anything. I remind him, I’ve done more than most.

“Those houses you sold are worth £3 million pounds now.”

“But I wouldn’t have had any adventure, Barry.”

He remembered the play we performed in the Oyster Company, the summer of 1985. “The red knickers.” He chuckled. “Tatiana’s red knickers.”

“Do you remember the vase of blue Corn Flowers?”

“Yes,” he marveled.

I’m not going to explain. You had to be there.

4.

The dogs curled up on the sofa. They ate cheese. They are still sleeping. It’s midday. They don’t have to worry about the pig and the dog we shared our time with these past few weeks in Barnes. We are going to walk in the rain. We are going to meet him, feel his soft skin under his coat. Just like the old days. Kissing in the street.

It’s been months since we last spoke. My harried exit from the USA only made our separation more dramatic. Those last fraught days before Abby drove me over the border. I had no time to explain, no time to say goodbye. Of course, I saw your brother in Seville but he provided scant consolation. I think about you often… and why not? We saw each other frequently. In lieu of our conversations I imagined your first experience of burning man. I wonder with a wry, affectionate grin your house filling with even more bits and pieces.

Toward the end of my time in the USA Ithink you knew just how miserable, trapped and disappointed I had become. Increasingly overwhelmed by my hatred for almost everyone except you. I wanted you to know just how relaxed I am here. It’s not Nirvana but I can travel, I can speak English to those who understand and most of all? The problems I encounter here I can deal with more than adequately. I would rather the English disappoint me than strangers from another shore.

The gays here do not confuse me with some character they’ve seen on TV. And even tho I might say I don’t want to fall in love… it’s maybe because I don’t dare love possible.

I’ve no idea if we will ever meet again. If we have anything more to say to each other but I wanted you to know how grateful I was. We had a blast. I wanted you to know that I love you very much.

DPR

1.

My journey across Europe has been deliciously eventful. However, these past few weeks in Dorset were perhaps the most scintillating… and British.

My time on the West Dorset/East Devon border was tied up in British convention. Rules of social engagement forged over hundreds of years by our ruling class… manners maketh man. Rules, before my stint in the USA, I adhered to (mostly) and challenged unsuccessfully. In the USA I learned a different social practice and without my daily dose of British self loathing I learned a very useful trick most Brits seem oblivious: Self Esteem. Consequently, revisiting the rules governing so much of our British social life has been a little disorienting because… I am Johnny Foreigner and the brits at play (and in the house of commons) sound more like inchoate chattering chimps than adroit conversationalist.

The British, upon meeting a stranger, like any un-evolved primate seek to assert themselves and on rare occasions and only when appropriate… defer. A British person, full ape… will never give in to money, power or prestige. They only give up their seat on the bus to those born to sit in it.

Socially, the Brits engage a very specific modus operandi.

Firstly, they establish the worth of the other. They quickly seek to discover reasons for any shame he/she should feel for merely being alive: At Monkton Wyld Court, Simon Fairlie’s obnoxious wife Gill Baron the imperious editor of The Land Magazine, rearing up on her hind legs, reminded me I had been expelled from Monkton Wyld School even though Gill conveniently forgets both she and her clochard husband were also expelled. Bette Bright, whilst grooming another female in the pack, wanted me to remember I had once pretended to be a Lord. Another creepy petit bourgeois reptile told me I didn’t deserve my accent. All of which would have once caused me to shy, no flinch when I lived in the UK. After so long in the USAthis British social venom fails to work as I carry more than enough antidote.

As it turns out, the critical gaze of a posh, British person is surprisingly easy to ignore. The shaming swipe effortlessly parried. The knowing laugh means nothing at all and hangs in the air like a fart. Their sly grin makes the posh Brit look like they have learning difficulties. I was surprised by how often these rather crude techniques are used and how unsophisticated the most sophisticated Brit appears once you lift up his skirt and smell his unwashed cunt.

Bette Bright, married to singer and TV entertainer Suggs from the band Madness was the first Brit who wanted to remind me of my place. The very notion of one’s place is so uniquely British. As I was leaving a not so amusing Sunday lunch party in Whitstable with my friend Simon Martin, director of The Pallant Gallery, Bette sat bloated and over dressed, her fat cheeks once sweetly girlish now pock-marked and scribbled with red, broken veins. She wore green, over sized bakelite jewelry, a large bottom impedes her journey.

I had once been very friendly with her sister Alana who died of pancreatic cancer. Attempting to make me uncomfortable she announced across the table, “Lord Anthony Rensdlesham, wasn’t it?” I was momentarily stunned as I had no cause to be reminded of that particular adventure, not for twenty years or more. Remember… I am not my story. Perhaps the best and most enduring gift AA afforded me. As Anthony Rendlesham had once been my name I was thrown into a different world. A centuries old world of sophistication, Fortuny and… Falconetti.

I asked her why she wanted to remind me of something I had lived 40 years ago. What was her aim? If her aim was to shame me… she had failed. I wondered out loud why a straight, white, affluent woman was trying to shame a gay person of color.

“How rude! ” She said.

“White fragility, white heterosexual fragility.” I replied.

She looked perplexed by my comment. “I have lots of gay friends.”

“And you learned nothing from them? Bette Bright, gay men know a great deal about reinvention… so odd you’ve not had that conversation. Didn’t you reinvent yourself Bette?”

I continued with vigor.

“Yes. Of course you did. You were born plain Anne Martin. Dull Anne. Well, dear, what’s good for the gander… is good for this goose. You may call me Lord Anthony Rendlesham.”

I swept out of the party. Leaving her spluttering into her summer pudding.

A theme emerged forcibly throughout the rest of my journey. I asked my friend the Weymouth born artist Graham Snow if he too experienced homophobia amongst the affluent, the ruling class, the petit bourgeois. He blurted out a list of ghastly things he puts up with. He is quite the most lonely person I have ever met, made more lonely by his so-called ‘friends’ who do not want the best for him. Like Lucy Ferry making disparaging remarks about Lee McQueen’s rough east end boyfriends. Those woman kept that boy lonely. They used him, like Graham is used by unscrupulous heterosexuals. Graham, born in the 40’s, was shielded from the true horror of the most virulent hatred of the gays by his friendship with extraordinary men… like David Hockney and John Schlesinger. He has thick, thick skin after enduring years of glancing blows from the casual homophobe.

Homophobia is real and crippling and we dare not talk about it just in case it makes us vulnerable. A British aristocrat loves to mine another’s vulnerability. Reminding you he is whiter, more well-bred, more heterosexual and closer to the crown than YOU.

Perhaps I’m looking for trouble. Perhaps I’m too sensitive. Perhaps the blonde, female fitness instructor who has coffee at Dave’s Deli in Whitstable is not a homophobe but just doesn’t like me. There seems nothing worse to a recent Whitstable resident than these words: I was born here.

I am not an easy gay, I am not the kind of gay man who ignores a casual homophobic aside. If ‘Woodsy’ the window cleaner wonders why I am in Whitstable and doesn’t like it… maybe he’s scared I know a little too much about his past.

After a rather grueling tour via Swanage of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast with Graham Snow, he took me to the home of some very English sub aristocrats for dinner. Writer Jason Goodwin, son of Jocasta Innes and his very Nigella Lawson type wife. Their house was a typical English country affectation. A Christopher Gibbs pastiche thrown together with no money. Piles of rotting books, sagging sofas and a smokey fireplace. Their dogs were aggressive and needy, they want to sit on your lap then bite your hand. The food was overcooked, the conversation tepid… I sat opposite our host and a charming Italian woman Anna Orsini from the British Fashion Council and an Oxford don who loathed Jeremy Corbyn and still believed in slavery.

A forlorn, bald man sat beside the don, Matthew Rice whose wife Emma Bridgewater had recently and very abruptly left him. She had not mentioned him, he wailed, on Desert Island Disks. Apparently it is sexist to ask if she is menopausal. Now she has gone (she is not coming back) perhaps Mr Rice should bite the gay bullet. I mean… he can’t possibly be straight. Can he? Years of stenciling fowl onto earthenware might betray something of the fey in a man.

During the second course (roast lamb) shop keeper and Poundbury apologist Ben Pentreath arrived. A very British gay handful. His simpering, tongue tied husband in tow… brutally eclipsed by Ben’s scintillating, room filling persona. Ben excused himself… they had been to another party. The dull husband threw Katie a huge bunch of vulgar dahlias. Ben had stories to tell and took charge of the table as best he could. He mocked his boss Prince Charles with an uninspired impersonation. Our host and hostess gasped and giggled like naughty Victorian children enthralled by a Zoetrope, tittering at everything the clown queen regaled.

Ben and his pretty husband live in a parsonage not far from Jason and Katie. The house has been ‘published’. They show me pictures in a magazine of Ben’s equally annoying interior. Stuck in a grim place where a potager is still essential and an escritoire ‘sublime’. More stuff. Acres of stuff. Rooms full of stuff. Stuff Poundbury bought. Stuff set against emerald walls, set against raspberry blancmange, more and more, lustre ware, vulgar dahlias… bunches and bunches of them.

After dinner I sank uncomfortably into the sofa, consumed by horse hair and damp feathers. Ben wanted to introduce me to the ‘most perfect’ man.

“I have the most perfect man for you!”

Announcing to the room I needed a boyfriend. I told him to google me. I couldn’t imagine he would want to introduce me to anyone after he had read everything there is to read about me…

“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said.

Jason sat beside me. Looking intently. He asked why I didn’t want a boyfriend. I told him a little of my story. Unpacking the bags. I mentioned coming out at 13, he asked dismissively why it was so important to ‘come out’.

“Ask your best friend Ben,” I said. Ben balked.

Ben ditched the resting bitch face and looked quite real, momentarily. He told Jason he was 27 when he came out, when he told his brother he was gay his brother reacted very negatively. Jason was shocked. I realized these two men who claim to be best friends don’t know each other… at all.

Jason Goodwin, enjoying his casual homophobia, sneered at my sadness for all the men I knew who died of AIDS, questioning my PTSD. Jason sneered harder when I told him how the lgbt community must still fight for equality and wondered why I let cruel Section 28 affect me. Jason, like so many men of his class, thought us impudent for wanting more. Now he sits in the front row of his gay best friend’s wedding. As for Ben Pentreith, what fight did he put up? He let the rest of us do the heavy lifting. At his wedding he scarcely gave a thought to the men who sacrificed so much for his happy day.

As a deliciously uncomfortable postscript I made Ben describe how gay hook up apps like Grindr and Scruff work to the assembled crew of stodgy heterosexuals. It was gleefully entertaining. “Scruff?” They repeated disdainfully. They wrinkled their noses, fanning away the imagined smell of the word.

2.

I met a man I had brief crush upon, He was blond and sensitive and sturdy. I didn’t make a move. I think I would have fallen in love. I bought him a bottle of gin.

Monkton Wyld. I was staying in the house of a retired Dr and his Christian wife. They were touring Australia and New Zealand. The Monkton Wyld rectory was filled with opaque plastic boxes containing a life of habitual collecting. Bits and pieces. Scraps of fabric, knitting needles, tapestry. Every room has a sofa, even the dining room. The Christian wife does not want to live anywhere other than the huge house in the country where she keeps her charming husband hostage. He wants to live in Australia near his adored kids. They’ve brought a little slice of Surrey to the vail of Monkton Wyld. Tennis courts, over planted herbaceous borders, a rockery and sweeping lawns. Their staircase and landing is painted a delightful jade color but she doesn’t like it. She wants to paint it, he doesn’t want to spend £3000. She is unhappy. They are unhappy.

They left the house. Went away for 6 weeks. When they returned she had read all about me on the internet. I could see from her pinched lips, her sallow… indirect look. Too much of a coward to look me in the face and tell me what she really thought. Her Christianity didn’t allow her to approve of gay men. Even though she has a bisexual daughter. So she dressed up her disapproval with a shocking number of complaints about my stay at their house. The water pump had stopped working and would cost them £1,800 to put right. Some of the plants in the greenhouse had died. There was dog shit in the herbaceous borders. I had bought the wrong cat food.

There is a field at the bottom of their garden the local disliked farmer wants to sell. I hope someone buys the field and builds a big beautiful house in that field souring their perfect view. Perhaps I will.

Whilst in Dorset I took a little road trip 50 miles North to see Rachel Campbell-Johnston who was once the lover and friend of Sebastian Horsley. She is the art critic for the London Times. The final weeks of my drug use was spent with her and Sebastian. I specifically remember her vomiting out of a black cab on Kensington High St after doing reams of cocaine in 1997. The taxi driver looked so disappointed.

“What’s a pretty girl like you behaving like this.” he said.

Well, Rachel made millions from property investments (selling an old shed in Kensal Rise to Bella Freud) and bought an austere house near South Molton on Exmoor. She lives there with her daughter Katya, her mother, lurchers and two funny goats. Her marriage to my friend Jayne’s husband Willy spectacularly failed. Their friends forced to take sides.

“Don’t talk about it!” She demanded.

I had totally forgotten she married Willy Nickerson, now she wants me to forget all over again. We reminisced about Whitstable. The Peter Cushing House. She attempted to shame me by wondering if I owned the house in Whitstable, or did it belong to someone else?

“No, it was mine.” I smiled, her icy stare not altering the temperature one jot.

“I didn’t own the house in Adam and Eve Mews.” I added, “That was my boyfriend’s.”

“Your dogs are so fucking ugly.” She said.

As if on cue one of her lurchers grabbed a huge leg of pork from the kitchen table and ran off with it. Rachel sprinted after the dog and returned with the mangled joint. She put it in the oven. “That’s what country folk do.” She said.

She remembered visiting me in Whitstable with Sebastian, Tricia and Paul Simonon from The Clash. She pointed at the bottle of wine on the kitchen table.

“We own these vineyards.”

I looked at her. Carefully. Wondering if she would ever grow up and make sense of what it might mean to be a wife and mother. She had failed so spectacularly at both.

The following day we sat with Laura and Peter Carew who I found myself liking a great deal. I reminded them I had been nominated for an academy award and gone to Sundance and opened many film festivals all over the world, which is far more than most of the wannabees we hung out with who told you they would… but never did.

“Look at his dogs,” Rachel spewed,”They are so fucking ugly.”

Although the Carew’s house is jammed with stuff like the houses of all these country people it is welcoming and warm. Lunch, a couple of chops and some salad. It suits Laura very much to have staff and land. Sheep and cattle. She’s only a decade from living on Exmoor full-time. Giving in to the lure of headscarves, tweed skirts, lambing, and driving a Landrover full tilt over the sodden moor.

I didn’t drive home the night I left Exmoor. I hanker for the sea. For Lyme Regis.

I was happy to see it. Lyme will always remind me of my first great love: Gerard Falconetti, grand son of Renee Jeanne. He played Meryl Streep’s real-time lover in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He was my lover and friend, he was also the first man I knew during those heady times to die of AIDS. When the doctors told him he would die of that cruel and terrible disease he threw himself from the roof of the Tour Montparnasse.

The harvest festival held earlier this month at St Andrew’s Church in Monkton Wyld, Dorset was quite an occasion. The magnificent, flint faced, neo-Gothic church is rarely used. It has an imposing steeple and a lavish transept, it has retained all of its original features. St Andrew’s church and the matching parsonage were designed in 1848 by Pugin’s well-respected pupil Richard Cromwell Carpenter.

There are few souls living in this tiny hamlet and fewer Christians, the church opens no more than a handful of times a year. The traveling vicar conducted 5 harvest festival services from Charmouth to Axminster that Sunday and by the time he had gotten to us at dusk he’d refined quite a routine. As we sat waiting for the service to begin a dormouse skipped over the altar.

After singing a few elderly harvest hymns and reciting some appropriately salubrious prayers we drank locally made apple juice and ate locally made apple cake served with thick unpasteurized jersey cream. There was an auction of local produce and people eagerly snapped up their neighbor’s home-grown vegetables… including a giant pumpkin. Katherine from the Monkton Wyld Community brought home-made sausages and Monkton Wyld Court cheese, it sold for a good price raising money for the repair of this delightful Victorian church.

I’ve been in Dorset these past six weeks, looking after a friend of a friend’s huge and imposing Edwardian rectory. Monkton Wyld sits on the edge of Marshwood Vale. This ancient countryside is still divided by hedgerow, the roads flanked by steep mossy banks decorated with ivy and bracken. As the autumn crept over us, the leaves fell from the beech trees revealing the sea at Lyme Bay and Charmouth beyond. Catching the sun like great mirrors, two miles away.

This red brick house was built in 1901 to replace the draughty, original parsonage built conveniently next to St Andrew’s. The parsonage below us is a neo-Gothic masterpiece, similarly faced with perfectly knapped chert. The house sits proudly in a garden copied by Cromwell Carpenter from a surviving medieval English manor.

The rooms at Monkton Wyld Court are large and well proportioned, there is a delightful and unexpected internal courtyard where bats fly at dusk, a kitchen garden that provides enough vegetables all year for the community of people who live in the house and their paying guests. A short way away from the main house, down a well trodden path there is a charming oak framed milking parlor that serves four cows, and every week I’ve stayed here I’ve bought Monkton Wyld cheese or yogurt or milk that tastes unlike any milk I’ve ever tasted.

For the past 40 years I have returned to this valley. Once, hitch hiking from Whitstable to Charmouth to revisit Monkton. As a child I had a magical relationship with this place and I continue to return. When I arrive (however I get here) I walk into the valley, past the stream, up the hill, down the drive. I am immediately transported to a better place. The laurel, the rhododendrons, the great ornamental pines. The rope swing hanging from the ancient Douglas Fir and has done for 80 years, giving so many children so much pleasure.

This is where I went to school, albeit briefly, sadly getting expelled for appalling behaviour. Yet, in 1971 I experienced moments of pure joy in this perfect place. Here I learned everything. I learned how to ride, play the piano, bake bread… I learned how to live in a house with two staircases and how to use an Aga. I read the Norse tales and was read the Greek myths by handsome Chris under the same Douglas fir on lazy hot July afternoons. There I met the Minotaur, felt intoxicated by the story of the king who held him in the labyrinth. Names I will never forget: Daedalus, Theseus, Knossos.

It was here I experimented with my fledgling sexuality with a boy called Jasper. It was here I lay beside Amaryllis and held her breasts. It was here we sped these lanes in an old land rover to Lyme Bay. It was here the older kids took acid and we drank scrumpy. It was in this place I read the banned magazine Oz and when I took that magazine home to Whitstable my parents confiscated it, stunned… as if it were Satan’s pamphlet.

The school kids were wild and articulate and the staff equally so. Every day we had a noisy school meeting where problems were solved and punishments dished out. We ate home-baked bread and whatever the kitchen garden provided. We smoked, our hair grew out, we bathed rarely…. wandering around the school like homeless people. The older kids listened to Alice Cooper and I bought my first single in Axminster, Gaye by Clifford T Ward.

My best friend was Tom Melly. George’s son. Tom and I burned great towers of cardboard pretending they were tower blocks and commentated upon them like BBC journalists as they fell into a burning heap. We explored the stream at the end of the valley and leapt over ravines and fought fern monsters, their tendrils wrapped around out legs like snakes. We invented our own labyrinth and escaped from it. My friendship with Tom wildly impressed my parents who asked endless questions whenever I hung out with Tom and his dad. Yet, for all of this I could not deal with a life unfettered. I had come from a strict house and the damage had already been done. After a shoplifting binge in Lyme Regis I was expelled… and that was that. But my love for Monkton never dimmed. Every time I return to Monkton Wyld I wonder when I leave if I this will be my last visit. I savor every minute, every star above us, every sunrise.

My stay here included meeting community members, some of the Monkton Wyld Community trustees and my immediate neighbors. One in particular grabbed my attention, a single dad who teaches survival skills all over the world. His curly blond hair and fair complexion, his sensitive disposition coupled with his physical strength. What a man!

I met a very posh farmer from Dorchester who gave me a haunch of venison and two excellent cuts of pork. Melanie DB cooked the venison and I cooked the pork. The dogs set upon the bones ravenously. I visited my friend Graham in Weymouth and had a lovely time. We explored country churches and had tea with the Earl and Countess of Sandwich at Mary Lou Sturridge’s Seaside Boarding House. I ate delicious lunches on my own at Hugh’s River Cottage restaurant in Axminster and one very ugly lunch at Mark Hix’s ghastly restaurant in Lyme Regis: three goujons of cod and a pile of rancid chips for £20.

Of course I looked at property and imagined building a place in the middle of nowhere. I traveled to Exmore and stayed with Rachel Campbell Johnston and her dear daughter. We had long walks along the cliffs near Illfracomb and dropped in on Laura Carew. Laura and I hiked the perimeter of her estate which took hours. The little dog soldiered on valiantly. Then, when all was said and done, I drive back to Monkton and sleep soundly in my huge, comfortable bed.

Monkton Wyld School closed in 1981 and now the old parsonage houses a Centre for Sustainability Education, The Court is run and maintained by a residential community as well as a team of short-term volunteers.

Here is a short documentary about Monkton Wyld School made at the time I was there:

These past few days he caught my attention. Harvey Weinstein. Unmasked.

Petulant, controlling, surly. Harvey’s behaviour well-known in LA, often reported. His verbal abuse of others tolerated, excused, even celebrated. Harvey believed the only way to achieve his ambition was absolute control. The only way to win Hollywood.

Then, Harvey’s life unraveled. The women spoke out. The Mossad agents protecting Harvey stood down. Stories leaked, reputable media outlets ignore the story until the sound of those women screaming could no longer be ignored. Rape, molestation, finger fucking.

I am powerless over my addiction… my life has become unmanageable. It’s a pretty astute description of any addict. I am powerless over that which may kill me: drugs/drink/gambling/sex/food. I do not consider the consequences of my actions therefore: my life falls apart.

Any addict who confronts their addiction must first accept the notion of powerlessness. This seems obvious to most addicts hitting our desperate rock bottom… but I betcha a billion dollars Harvey Weinstein, whose name is synonymous with the word control, will struggle to understand this baffling first step. He may never understand but unless he humbly embraces his part in this catastrophe of his own making there will be no second chance, no triumphant return to Hollywood for Harvey Weinstein.

I met Harvey a few times these past 20 years, notably at the NYC Philomena screening with Fern Mallis. He was gruff and rude. I didn’t expect anything else. Weinstein had long ago become a grotesque caricature of himself. There are so many apocryphal stories about Harvey Weinstein from too many miserable producers and directors… their projects in tatters after Harvey intervenes; re-cuts, re-imagines, ultimately buying and bludgeoning the outcome of their project into his project. An editor told to lose all the wide shots from a director’s cut because, according to Harvey, wide shots are meaningless if one is watching the movie on a tiny screen in an airplane.

Harvey could make or break a career in Hollywood. There was no other narrative on offer. Film folk strode bravely into the Weinstein inferno never knowing if they and their film would return ruined or gilded with Oscar gold.

Men like Harvey are very familiar in Hollywood. The executives, CEOs and super lawyers I met owning up to their addiction in the rooms of AA and SAA in LA all had similar stories, sobbing when they got caught, pleading with their wives not to lose access to their children. Every day confessing misogyny to their peers at stag meetings all over the West Side.

Powerless…

Let’s get one thing straight. Harvey did not act alone. He had a bunch of conspirators: lawyers, assistants and relatives. The most powerful players in Hollywood looked after him, turned a blind eye to his appalling behavior… ’cause he made them billions of dollars. Studio and Agency bosses who, although they did not do the abusing themselves, aided and abetted his abuse. He could rely on a cabal of powerful white men to get him out of trouble by paying his victims and making them sign crippling nda.

Unless you’ve sat with men like Harvey Weinstein listening to their most troubling secrets it is impossible to explain how they get away with what Harvey got away with. These problems go to the very heart of the Hollywood star making… and taking away machine.

Let’s remind ourselves, this outrage wasn’t generated by women. Women’s stories have been used as evidence for the prosecution but this scandal was manufactured by men to strategically bring Harvey Weinstein down. D’you think for one moment if he hadn’t pissed somebody off really badly this story would be news?

When Harvey became too much of a liability, powerful men removed his protected status. Why did they choose to bring him down now after years of abuse? Why did it suit them to make an example of him? Why?

There are many men like Harvey in positions of power in the entertainment industry… in every industry, behaving just like Harvey. There’s little appetite for real change. We condemn people for not speaking up sooner, for not breaking the silence. Yet, some of the brave women who told the truth about Harvey have been savagely criticised for doing so. Why did they accept a cash settlement from The Weinstein Company in lieu of the truth? We all know why. Male abusers are preciously, lavishly safe guarded.

Unlimited access to sex with whomever you desire is the greatest prize afforded to those who make millions and achieve high status. Men, who without question or sacrifice can ‘grab them by the pussy’ without consequence. Can cum over an intern’s blue dress as she kneels demurely in the Oval Office. Can grab a young boys ass and know he wouldn’t dare complain.

Nobody wants to hear the truth about powerful men. Everyone wants to shoot the messenger. Remember when I wrote about Bryan Singer?

Another ‘open secret’: fashion photographer Bruce Weber continues to behave like Harvey Weinstein toward young male models. Taking pictures of them naked for his ‘private collection’ molesting and assaulting and promising lucrative campaigns if they give in to his gentle caress, taking the campaign away if they refuse.

This is as big a secret as Harvey’s expose. How does it sound? Who wants to shoot the messenger? Every fashion editor in the world turns a blind eye, a deaf ear. When Terry Richardson was exposed they said nothing. Terry still works… making money the rest of us can only dream of.

I had these experiences. Accepting the invitation construed as a tacit agreement to have sex. And yes. It’s all about privilege, entitlement… my first ‘date’ with a very famous hair dresser ended with what I now understand was rape. I was 18. He had the power to change my life. My story sounds pathetic when I tell it to myself in isolation, I learned not to tell it. Together these stories change perceptions, and make us stronger. This outrage breaking over the world about Weinstein sends a clear message to those men with power and entitlement to reconsider what is acceptable behavior. I am not a victim. Telling our stories will not make us victims. I am not my story.

Bradford on Avon. September. I’m looking over her gently terraced garden, sitting at the desk of an old friend in her honey coloured Georgian house. The sun peeking out from an angry, black cloud. Gold finches at the bird table, brambles growing into the Kent Cobb Nut tree, blackberries ripe and ready to harvest. Beyond this garden there are 18th century terraces built of crumbling bath stone. There is a freshly planted parterre, the tiny box hedges won’t be ready for another two years. Box grows so slowly. All over the English countryside gardeners tend their neatly trimmed topiary, privet sculpted into elegant forms. The muscles in my back and neck are still tender from the last few months of anxious reckoning.

From my home in the USA… things are grim. That’s that. AMERICA. Every day the news gets worse. Trump’s white supremacist vision for the USA. Unpicking every half-hearted Obama achievement. Making the point of his white presidency to undo a black man’s legacy. Indisputable evidence… I escaped at the right time. I can’t understand people who stick around. What more do they need to see or hear before they leave that god forsaken Trump hole?

The most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.”

Thankfully I’m home. Home in England. I left my friends in Chamonix after we enjoyed a few days vacation in Northern Italy and yet another adventure on the Tuscan coast. I drove to Paris, left Dude with my friend Mary and the following day Little Dog and I caught the P&O ferry to Dover where I met my sister Roya. A few miles later I was sitting on the sunny lawn of my friend’s lavish Queen Anne mansion reconfigured in 1911 by Edward Lutyens.

It was the first time I’d met my sister, we’d spent a few years skyping since she introduced herself online. Now, here she was in all her lesbian glory with her delightful girlfriend drinking champagne on the velvet lawns of the English countryside. I’m sure she felt anxious. I’m sure she felt confused. We have ten brothers and sisters.

I’ve avoided England. Voting from afar, now I return. I must admit… I’m in love with you, the English, in love with you all. I understand you, you are gentle, even the hardest amongst you. You’ll never be as inflexible and humorless as the Americans. On the ferry home I listened to two middle-aged couples describing their lives on the roads of Europe. Motor homes. I envied them. On the road. Free. Unencumbered.

For the first time, however, the British have been divided. Not along lines of class or political affiliation but whether one is a brexiteer or not. Tentatively enquiring when one meets a friend if they voted for or against brexit. They might be that kind of person. Yet, as I waited at the traffic lights in Camden Town I saw a river of diversity. So unique, colorful… so English. Evidence just there on that grimy North London street: thousands of years of cultural amalgamation.

Our leaders seem so terribly out of step with the people they lead.

The English are very sweet. A ready smile, a polite greeting, they have a charming disposition. Drivers thank you for courteous driving, we stick to the correct lanes on the motorway. The British are engaging and inquisitive. After so many years walking streets in the USA, I gave up saying good morning or smiling at strangers. Here is a nation of men and women who without hesitation are eager to trust, eager to forgive and desperately want to smile whenever they chance upon a stranger.

Perhaps it’s me? Perhaps I am so happy to be back they recognise my unbridled happiness? I don’t think so. It’s them, the British, naturally optimistic, even though they are unaware of their optimism. They can’t see it. They would disagree if I told them to their face.

I was excited to see my home town, but I was too tired to drive to Whitstable the night I arrived. I planned to go after my sister and her girlfriend left but instead I crept into a huge bed with the Little Dog and slept soundly. In the morning I found the wonderful Barham Community Store, read the newspaper then headed up the M2 to the north Kent coast.

I parked the car on Harbour Street and had coffee at Dave’s Deli, he was adorable. His sister works there. We talked about Richard Green. He has been very sick. Everyone I met seemed delighted to see me and hugged me or shook my hand vigorously. People I’d known all my life. Half a century or more.

Yet, for all the time passed since I first cycled up Harbour Street at 7 years old on my red tricycle… not much has changed. There’s more money but there’s more money swamping the south-east, all the way to Margate. I explored the town and lingered outside all three of my houses. They were just as I left them. The house on Island Wall has a very smart garden and the house next door has nice new Victorian sash windows. Number 3 Seaway Cottages on Wavecrest (owned by Peter Cushing before me) is a little forlorn. The owner hasn’t been there all summer and the garden has overgrown terribly. Number 2 Seaway Cottages has been renovated several times since I left, they have built a 20 foot kitchen onto the back of the house. Thankfully they kept the expensive door handles and light switches.

I didn’t miss the houses on Whitstable beach, not one little bit. They were mine, I sold them for a huge profit and I moved on. People ask if I miss the money they would be worth now and I remind them they are only worth money when you sell them. I miss them not at all, they gave me the oppertunity to move on in style. I have never wished to be there again, no nostalgia… no regret. Not like Malibu… I hanker after Malibu.

Of course, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Some uppity British people are very eager to remind you of your place in society, reminding me of my own ancient history… but I’m an American now so those archaic rules don’t apply to me.

I’ll never recover from my love of LA. However badly it treated me. I will never forget our ill-fated house in Malibu. The restaurant at the end of the pier. The Jacaranda, the delicate pepper trees, those tall palms glistening like cellophane when the rains finally came. Have you seen Pharrell’s video for his song Happy? That’s how I’ll remember LA. The light, the streets, down town Los Angeles, the fat and the thin. Looking heavenward, remembering why we moved there armed only with dreams. Pleading for security, good traffic, and a god who loves us even if the dream slips further from our grasp…

When I left LA I earned more money than I ever earned. What foolishness made me give it up? Fear. The same fear I had in NY and no longer feel here in Europe. Fear of the speeding bullet, the rogue cop, fear of mud slides, wild fires… and me.

Last week I purged almost all the white, American gay men from my Facebook friends list. When I announced I was doing so… Facebook banned me for a week. Thank you Big Brother, no Facebook means no compulsive checking. I didn’t recognize any of the gay white American men who claimed to know me, or I had friended because I am weak and colluded with the notion the gays gather as many other gays around them as we possibly can so we may perpetuate the myth of gay solidarity.

According to Facebook, this declaration to purge unknown faces from my FB page was hate speak.

I was an unwilling participant in an anonymous gay web. I don’t know the 50 people we have in common. I don’t want to know the 28 mutual friends. The 42 people who don’t know each other more than passing their clone on Robertson, Old Compton St, Commercial Street or Ocean Walk. Lives as the gays chose to document on FB, so utterly boring, so stultifyingly limited. Haunting the same locations, using exactly the same language we used 50 years ago… and on… the perpetual hunt, the same miserable polemic. One hundred thousand likes for a shirtless picture. A million Instagram followers for the most perfectly honed of them.

Recently a young gay man, beset by righteous indignation, complained to his 5 thousand followers his profile pic had been stolen and used on a well-known dating app. I wondered out loud (amongst the commiseration) why they had bothered stealing the image? The picture they appropriated was so utterly boring, so drearily identical to any number of equally dull gay men. There was nothing distinguished or vaguely fascinating about the stolen photograph. My comment caused OUTRAGE.

Their outrage is misplaced. The gays are so often angry but unwilling to take action. Emboldened by changing laws: each new generation of gays relive their very own glasnost, embracing ersatz activism. Their muscle drag and occasional militancy leads nowhere. Built like warriors, Spartans… fucking not fighting. Marching in the gay parade, holding their radical (campy) signs high above their heads then… a few hours later it’s back to the soupy hot tub for more identically built/identically aged/undressed… perpetual strangers. Cock first, talk later.

I seemed, during my time in the USA, to know two types of (repugnant) white gay men:

1. Semi aquatic gays who hang out in hot tubs and swimming pools. Boasting on-line about their open relationships, their poly amorous lives, one assumes they are ok smelling the stench of other men’s cum over their husband’s perfectly sculpted bodies.

2. Then there are gays like John Derian, the fay New York based purveyor of knickknacks. Publishing pictures of their grand houses, their grand friends, their holidays in equally magnificent surroundings. They need me to know what they eat, how they dress their surrogate children, how they arrange flowers and prepare the canape. These gays have open relationships built on mergers and acquisitions. Choosing men as they choose tuba roses at the farmers market. As far from love and monogamy as one can get.

The purge is complete. The result of this time-consuming exercise? My feed as dictated by Big Brother’s algorithms is now more representative of who I am. People I know in the world posting pictures of things I want to look at, asking questions I can answer, engaging meaningfully with me.

Good God! I knew so many white, American gays, fledgling proto fascists. Echoing fake news, convincing one after another what they want to us all to believe… amplifying easily digestible myths then greedily consuming them like protein bars. Post by post confirming their collective denial of what the gay community has become and where the community is headed.

During the election the noise of the myth makers in the pink echo chamber became deafening. Everyone, of course, claimed to know Robby Mook, Clinton’s gay campaign manager. Armed with their exclusive Robby Mook whispers they convinced themselves and others Hillary Clinton was unassailable. They believed everyone was thinking just like them. The violence I suffered at their hands when I told them bluntly they were wrong… was worse than any abuse I had ever suffered from any heterosexual homophobe. As it turned out, my take on the gay community was right… they were indeed wrong. Trump won.

I heard, via my own sources, Clinton beat Mook on the chest, crying and wailing…

Now the gays are right behind the liberal ‘reds in the bed’ narrative. Unquestioningly wedded to the dream of impeachment. Telling each other it’s only a matter of time before Trump is gone for good. They shyly, foolishly ask their friends on Facebook if another election will take place? After all, they bleat, we won the popular vote… even if the Russians lost Clinton the election. Their muddled polemic evolved amongst their good-looking selves on social media. Like in needle point class they stitch the narrative of their dreams as if it were true. Trump will be impeached they chant, Trump… is not my President!

My most violent confrontations on social media seems to erupt when I challenge American gay white men to explain how, as they claim, if they were hypothetically living in Nazi Germany would they take on Nazis? Contrary to their stringency most of the white gays I know would have willingly signed up to become Nazis… like most Germans did, to save their scrawny asses and of course wear the fabulous black and gold Gestapo uniforms.

My friend Bettina’s father, he lived in Germany during the war, told me he only heard about the concentration camps from annoying conspiracy theorists. The sort of people one didn’t want to believe. He was genuinely shocked, at the end of the war, to see the truth.

Few people are brave enough to challenge the regime under which they live. Most American white gays are incredibly comfortable. What would motivate any them to up sticks… unless forced to? Until the knock on the door. The stench of unwashed policemen in the kitchen demanding ‘papers’. Looking for evidence of homosexuality. The gays would hang on ’til the last-minute… until the authorities came looking for them.

The dumbest gays think in 1930 they would still enjoy the connectivity they enjoy today… their mobile phones and the internet. They think they would have access to a large group of similarly minded people, their mutual friends on Facebook. They do not understand the isolation of the activist. Activists in 1930 constantly wondered if they were the only human alive who thought the system… the regime was wrong. They were scared to articulate thoughts and ideas with others for fear of being arrested. Even gay or lesbian friends could not be trusted… lgbt friends regularly turned acquaintances over to the party for punishment.

Activists are often annoying, their message difficult to hear.

The pink triangle worn by gay men in the German concentration camps was the worst of all the badges… because it so often lead to violent and unexpected death from both guards and other inmates, the Jews in the camps would kill a gay wearing a pink triangle as easily as the Nazi. The Pink Triangle became something to aim at by bored soldiers looking for something to kill. Alan Davies the well-known and well-loved British comedian, lived in Whitstable whilst at Kent and Canterbury University. We knew each other but we were not particularly friendly. He wore a pink triangle badge into The Neptune pub in solidarity with the gays… yet continually indulged in casual and not so casual homophobia. He enjoyed his white heterosexual entitlement and when I challenged him to take off the badge he angrily determined it was his right to wear the triangle regardless of a gay man telling him he had not earned the privilege.

In the Neptune Pub I was told with sneering contempt marriage equality would never happen in my life time. Sadly, I believed them. However hard I fight, I thought, I’ll never live in a fair and equitable world.

When I made a fuss others insisted it didn’t matter. Making a fuss = activism.

Physically and verbally attacked for articulating (complaining) the iniquity and injustice gays endured every day. Made my friends feel uncomfortable.

Complaining = Activism

I wore pale blue overalls in LA County to determine I am gay. For all the world to see. There can be no mistaking what you are. They like to know exactly what they are dealing with… the authorities. Making me wear a pale blue uniform taught me a huge lesson. It flagged to the others: I am what you see me to be. I no longer enjoy invisibility. You will never let me forget my vulnerability. I am at your mercy. I learned what it was to be black in the USA wearing those overalls. My human rights lawyers assigned by the ACLU… Barry Litt and Lindsay Battles, perhaps the most ghastly people I ever met, never really understood how egregious the uniform was. They didn’t understand much other than their own egos. I hated them. I hated being around them.

I left the USA because I could no longer excuse how many innocent black men were murdered by the police paid by my tax dollars… and I asked myself: what would it take for me to think enough is enough and the first plane away? How could I justify living in a country that exploits vulnerability in all? All Americans I know, republican, democrat or progressive, buy into this version of capitalism: VULNERABILITY equals OPPORTUNITY. It is their DNA, add this to their inability to own up to uncomfortable historical facts about race and the people they displaced to live in the USA… and you have Donald Trump’s America, no different from how it always was but now the mask has gone.

Trump is going to be here for a long time. Get used to it. Nobody cares about the Russians, nobody cares if Trump is a fucking idiot. Everybody is now fully committed to the drama, the intensity of his high-octane reality TV style presidency. And get this, after his second term you’ll be voting for Ivanka who I assure you will be the first female american president.

Of course, not all gay white men believe we live in an unfair society. Since the wobbly supreme court equal marriage determination (so easily overturned) some white gay men think they are equal… the fight has been won. Even with Trump as president they convince themselves they are no longer vulnerable to exploitation. They are wrong. I am the annoying activist you don’t want to hear… to remind white American gays the battle is never won, the freedom you think you have is being eroded at this very moment in some back room at the Whitehouse in a deal between rabid Christians and some crazy Trumpista. We must always stay vigilant. Our battles fought honestly, not forged in the Supreme Court but in Congress and the Senate for all the world to see.

We spoke after getting our numbers for showers. I was number 87 and you was 86. Later that night I got out of the truck and smoked and you asked me something and then you got out and we talked for a bit. You are one nice guy and very sexy. I wish I would have been brave and asked you. If you read this what did you ask before getting out of your town? Would like to talk more and see if anything could happen.

Oscar Wilde reminds us ‘Youth is wasted on the young’. But… that was before the selfie, and the advent of the age of terminal narcissism. Thousands of American children arrest their own development by killing themselves with guns and drugs. They remain forever young on social media, perfectly pimped and pouting, biceps glistening, shirts lifted to reveal hairless abs… before the lethal opioid injection. I didn’t bother killing myself when I was young because I genuinely thought somebody else would do it for me. A bullet speeding through my brains.

Did you share a moment with yourself when you were young? A moment when you caught a glimpse, accidentally saw yourself in the mirror, a beautiful stranger looking back at you? Momentarily recognising your own youth and beauty? Has that happened to you?

I am 22, I’d been swimming in the Balham community swimming pool. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My black, wet hair stuck to my forehead, beads of water on my face, a slight blush on my cheeks. I knew I’d never be as young or as beautiful ever again. I never forgot his face, that… hopeful young man. I think I fell in love. I hanker for him… a chance encounter… a missed connection with the man I would always love above all others.

Recently I felt angry about the past. Something I couldn’t change… but it changed me. I felt angry our generation of gay men had not been allowed to flourish in the same way this generation has. I felt angry because I didn’t take relationships between men seriously, after all… what could a relationship with another man possibly lead to? Then AIDS came. Those haunted faces. Was I just meant to ignore the possibility of a gruesome death? The loathing I have for most entitled, white gay man had its genesis there… if I cannot love you I must hate you. Born out of shit covered sheets and young men begging not to die.

You were in the men’s dressing room at Balham Community Swimming Pool. Tuesday, round 2pm. July, 1982. Do you remember? You caught a glimpse of me in the mirror and smiled. You have a beautiful smile. We exchanged the briefest moment. I knew instantly you are the man for me. When I turned around… you vanished. I am from out-of-town. I have never returned to the pool but I often look in the mirror, wondering if you will be there. I wish I had been brave and asked you. Will you marry me?

All through my early 20’s I was convinced I had AIDS, I refused to believe the doctors when they told me I was not infected. I thought there was a conspiracy, doctors and nurses unwilling to tell me the truth. I had HIV test after test even though I was not having sex with anyone. I was so convinced I was dying of AIDS I ended up in hospital for my crazy obsession with death. One day a therapist asked me about my mother and the trauma of being handed over for adoption. “It’s life or death.” She said. Taken from your mother. Will you live or will you die? Fighting for life. Nothing else matters… but living. I wanted to live so badly. Yet the fear of death gripped me, driving me, defining the man I would become.

I must be safe, I must have a roof over my head, I must eat. Nothing else matters.

2.

There’s an english baby called Charlie Gard, he’s on a life support machine. There are many people who don’t accept his doctor’s grim prognosis, they want him to have experimental treatment in the USA. The experts say it’s no use. The Charlie Gard Army they call themselves, emboldened by shoddy science and encouraged by Donald Trump they are fighting for his life in the courts. These people are much like Americans who hang around abortion clinics intimidating women having abortions. They are frail like a baby, they are powerlessness like an unborn child, they are mortally injured by contemporary life, they are fighting the establishment the only way they know how. They are oblivious, in denial that Charlie Gard is already dead… much like themselves.

The dawns early light tip toeing over the mountain tops here in Chamonix. I am contemplating David’s funeral this Thursday and pondering my journey home to say a poignant au revoir when I discovered (by Facebook messenger) from our cousin Andy Roy my careless brothers Stuart and Martin Roy had jumped the gun and buried our father yesterday… two days ahead of the planned cremation, therefore robbing his friends and family of their opportunity to say goodbye.

Wreaths will go undelivered, his name spelt in white carnations and chrysanthemum. Days taken off work will be spent elsewhere.

Stuart and Martin, this was a desperate act of self sabotage.

The following was written before the fateful message…

1.

My father David Roy, even if he merely adopted me to save my Mother’s blushes, even if he was a violent family man from whom our mother failed to rescue herself or… us. Do we need to punish him in death? My brothers Martin and Stuart Roy seem to think so. Who are they punishing? They cannot hurt him. They merely seek to injure the living.

This picture of David on the left with his brothers Jimmy and Alec taken in 1964.

As he lay dying they were emptying his home.

My father was a social man, an avid sportsman, surrounded every night by his friends… described by my unsocial Mother as his ‘cronies’. This week, after he heard I had spoken to my father’s best friend Don, Martin Roy called Don and screamed at him, told him he could not come to the funeral, to stay ‘out of his family’. Don said no one had ever spoken to him like that. I remember Martin screaming at me… when I told the truth about our abusive father in my film AKA. Screaming, screaming to quiet the noise in his own head. Martin needs help… help to forgive, help letting go.

Martin Roy, I suggest you spend your meagre inheritance seeking answers before you destroy your son Oscar with your toxic nature. You think he’s oblivious to these rank shenanigans? You think sensitive little Oscar brought up by our mother in your home is… oblivious? Amazingly, you think our mother is going to succeed with Oscar when she failed so miserably with us?

My father’s friend Don sobbed on the phone as he described David’s last painful hours. My father begged Don not to leave him at the hospital, he didn’t want to be on his own when he died. He was terrified of being on his own. He called Don.

“Are you at the football club?” he asked.

“No, Dave. It’s 6am.”

Don seemed shocked by my father’s vulnerability, he did not recognise the man laying before him. I think Dave’s confusion… scared him. David did not call on his sons to help him face death. He knew he had ravaged us. He knew he would have to face the truth when he looked into our eyes. David did not want the truth. He called upon his friends who sat beside him as he took his last breath.

David Roy knew what kind of funeral he wanted. David wanted the funeral procession to pass by Cain’s, and linger a few minutes outside the arcade where he worked on Herne Bay seafront. He specified songs and hymns he wanted playing. He wanted, as the mourners left the chapel for a recording of Take That’s A Million Love Songs to remind them he was with them, he would always be with them.

All week I’ve been trying to have David’s last wishes honoured but I was thwarted by my brothers. The lady at the funeral home was very sympathetic. The young man at the crematorium told me my brothers had bought the cheapest funeral on offer. I told the family to ignore my brother’s threats. I encouraged them to go to the funeral and say their last goodbye. I hope the family and friends who loved David attend the funeral in Barham tomorrow. I hope they ignore the protestations of David’s two mortally wounded sons.

How much money could one pay a child to endure a miserable childhood? How much does it cost to beat a boy so badly he loses his way? How much money could one pay an adolescent for an absent father? How much money is it worth to a grown man to have his children ignored by his own father? What inheritance should a man receive for a life he knows his indifferent father thinks worthless?

Did David visit either of his sons in Prison? Martin and Stuart both had stints in prison for drugs and guns. Usual white trash bull shit. Nothing serious.

I’ve been thinking a great deal of my brothers this week. The price they paid for a destroyed family, the tragedy they endured. I thought of my brother Stuart and how much he suffered at his father’s hands and what little he will be paid for that suffering. I know for sure Stuart has never spoken to a therapist. Recently, on his way home from a convivial evening with friends, he was beaten in the street. Two boys took him down and a girl hammered a stiletto into his head, his wife Lucy screaming… pulling them off his frail body. Apparently he has not recovered from the attack. The beating he received as an adult must have reminded him of the beatings he received as a child. And what of crazy Martin? After years of hard-drinking, raving and hallucinogenics his wife falls down dead, his son left crawling over the corpse. What is that worth?

David Roy was not my blood father but he took the time to adopt me, saving my Mother the shame of having to explain her teenage indiscretion. When I found out David was not my father I was relieved… however, whatever happened between us I ended up feeling warmly toward him. Like a stranger in the street. I held no malice. This last thirty years I had written plays and films… I had spoken to therapists and counsellors and psychiatrists. Eventually I understood all I had… was my story and I knew in my heart: I am not my story, I am NOT my story. My forgiveness is real.

I hope Stuart and Martin find peace of mind… I doubt they ever will.

2.

I spent my birthday weekend with friends who live near Lari, Tuscany.

My friend Rachel lives with her husband Rick and their two daughters in a spacious converted barn. They have very territorial cats who immediately attacked poor Dude sinking their claws into his back. The screams were horrible to hear. Poor Dude.

Rachel’s delightful, wiry husband is such a BOY! Rick works as an engineer and loves paragliding, planes, boats and motorbikes all of which litter the huge plot of land they share with goats and their donkey Pablo. Rick was friendly, sympathetic and an incredibly attentive host. He took me to the local communist bar in Lari where we enjoyed wonderful views over vineyards where we smoked rolled cigarettes and drank espresso.

Lari is famous for the pasta company Martelli. And thank God it has this family owned company manufacturing pasta right in the middle of Lari. So many little towns in Tuscany have been affected by the economic disaster of 2007. So many crumbling mansions. So little to look forward to. This hillside fort has everything going for it including a theatre festival which began this week.

Rachel is the kind of Mother I wish I had. Kind, attentive, protective. I watched her parent her children, patiently guiding them… and I felt insulted, aggrieved. Insulted by the lack of love in my own childhood. Aggrieved the love I had for men was, until recently, maligned and devalued. I was not taught to love and the love I had for others dare not speak its name.

We had supper with her friend Steven, an elderly heterosexual english man with a partner 40 years his junior. He took us to a pork sandwich, hole in the wall restaurant… very Tuscan, perfect. We discussed Wilde, he was fascinated and fascinating.

I explored Pisa with their handsome nephew Davide and enjoyed Rick’s beautiful beach home in Castiglioncello on the Tuscan coast, once the home of Marcello Mastroianni. We ate squid ink pasta at a perfect beach side restaurant near the Villa Godilonda. On the way home I enjoyed the Umbrella Pines planted by the Medici. I love Umbrella Pines.

It was a perfect escape. A few hours drive from Chamonix. Thank God for the Mont Blanc tunnel.

A few delightful days in Paris and Barcelona restored my serenity. No more searing heat, the weather more temperate, heavy clouds bursting over us. The rain washing away the last of the red, Andalusian dust. Well dressed men, once again, to look at on the streets. Mary’s spare room, decorated with Honiton lace and embroidered white linen. We walk the length of Parc St Cloud with our dogs wearing gun boots and waxed jackets. The Little Dog is almost fully restored, his eye closes once again, his sagging jowl looks perfectly normal to those who do not know. One evening we helped friends of Mary move house. TV Producer Etienne Alban, recently separated from his wife and kids, moving in with his super cute… yoga instructor girlfriend. Alban and I carried a huge sofa six flights to their huge new attic apartment. After the exercise we enjoyed a wonderful dinner at The Hotel Edgar. Their boudin noir… superb.

The following day I drove from Paris to Chamonix listening to an audio recording of the novel 1984. It is a compellingly joyless book. Because I am a ditz I arrived a day early. So I booked the Hotel Isabelle and slept fitfully thinking about my time in Carmona. More specifically I dreamt about my Carmona host and friend Ana Corbero, the chatelaine of an 11 acre estate called The Pajarita nestled outside the old city walls of Carmona beneath the The Hotel Parador and the Cordoba Gate. I dreamt a huge storm roared as I looked north from Ana’s terrace toward the great plain which was once the sea. I was pointing at something. “Land ahoy!” In the dream the waves returned after a thousand years and swept over the fields of sunflowers. Sea monsters curled out of the petulant waves then crashed into the salty foam.

My time in Carmona with Ana had been stormy, her demeanor quite different from the beautiful girl I chanced upon 35 years ago.

I met Ana Corbero in 1985 or thereabouts introduced by gallerist and curator Celia Lyttleton. Ana was showing a collection of unremarkable paintings at the Albemarle Gallery. Celia introduced her as the daughter of a well-known Spanish sculptor, the girlfriend of a Lord. She was tiny… gamine, scarcely a women. Her queer and marvelous features delicately carved and flocked, her fierce and sparkling black eyes challenging those of us who dared contradict her. She demanded respect. Her flamenco gestures, her delicate collar bones. She was beautiful.

I don’t remember a great deal about the beginning of our friendship other than the first night at the gallery.

Ana had been enjoying a fractious relationship with the absurdly handsome Colin Campbell, 7th Earl Cawdor. I do not remember them visiting me in Whitstable but apparently they did. I do not remember going to Wheelers Oyster Bar and eating crab but apparently we did. I do remember Ana’s invitation to Brooklyn the following summer where I stayed in Colin’s huge apartment, the top floor of an abandoned school he and another had recently bought. It was located just over the Williamsburg Bridge. Brooklyn was very different then. Crack addicts sat on the stoop. The Puerto Rican community had not been replaced by Hasidic Jews and dumb looking hipsters. The sky at night was regularly lit by flaming, abandoned buildings. Some called these arson attacks: Jewish lightning.

The walk into Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge felt unnecessary. We stayed close to the apartment. Colin and I had a fairly raucous time. Even then I felt contempt for toffs but they had all the best toys so one tended to accept the invitations whenever they came. It was an eventful trip. I had a brief affair with the artist Paul Benney. I threw a bbq from the roof of Gerard Malanga’s apartment*. We were the only white people at an African-American block party and ended up in a black police captain’s humble house. He looked very uncomfortable. Years later, I understand why. White, english people badly educated about slavery or the history of black people in the USA. We must have seemed very disrespectful.

Ana and Colin’s relationship was passionate and destructive. I blamed Colin for his insensitivity toward Ana. I excused Ana her eccentricities. The last image I have of her at that time: Ana is resting serenely in a nest of pillows, she has written in pen on her forehead one word… SILENCE.

Years passed. Many years. I remembered the word scrawled on her face. Social media reintroduced us. She married Nabil Gholam an arab architect and 18 years ago they had a baby girl. Sadly, their child is badly disabled with a rare genetic disease. Against the odds, the child survives. Ana fought to make her daughter hear and see. She refused to accept the doctor’s bleak prognosis. Ana lived in Beirut during the Israeli bombardment. Breastfeeding on her balcony as the bombs fell. She adopted two more children. A boy and a girl, both Lebanese. The architect became successful. They bought apartments in London, Paris and Seville. When her grandparents who raised her died she bought the Pajarita with a small inheritance. The Pajarita, a modest finca surrounded by acres of scorched, brown earth and rock where the locals dumped their trash. Ana set to transforming this barren place with many gardeners into the paradise she and her family enjoy today.

During the years I suggested to traveling friends I knew to be in Spain… meet Ana. I sent the lazy, derivative Australian furniture designer Charles Wilson who I believed might benefit creatively from a stint in Andalusia. But Charles, another terrible drunk, ended up being thrown out of Xavier Corbero’s house in Barcelona because Ana’s step mother hated him. Charles refused to leave so Ana’s husband threatened him with gypsies (a common, vaguely racist, threat from Nabil) who would break Charles’s legs if he didn’t pack his bag and leave immediately.

I sent Jenna and Stephen Mack’s brother John Jr., son of billionaire Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. Even though I did not know John Jr. I trusted they would be a great fit. That introduction worked out very well. Now it was my turn to meet Ana. We communicated solely by text message. After the long drive from Nice I called her and, for the first time in 35 years, I heard her voice. The deep and rasping voice of somebody who smokes too many cigarettes or talks too much… or both.

“Why do you want to see me?” She asks over the phone.

I did not have an easy answer.

There was unfinished business between Ana and me. It was not tangible, it was esoteric. I had no expectations of Ana. I simply wanted to see her face. Without the word SILENCE scrawled on it. We might have met that afternoon, had a coffee and left it at that. I would have driven north. I had no idea what to expect but I was compelled to see her, meet her again. We arranged to meet at the small apartment she rented for guests in Carmona.

“How do you like your new digs?” She said as she got out of her huge silver Mercedes.

“Stay as long as you like.”

I gave her a long hug. Her father, Xavier Corbero, had recently died. I sniffed and she thought I was crying. “I’m not crying,” I said, “I’m sniffing.” Ana was back in my life. Her face was not the same as I remembered when I last saw her. She has hidden herself on social media because, I now understood, she could not bear what age had done to her. Almost immediately she complained how old she was, how raddled. She was embarrassed by her face.

It was true. Middle aged and middle class. Her face, bloated and pale, almost anemic. Her dry hair, she insisted she wanted to dye gray, streaked with sun bleached golden locks. Her eyes were just as fiery but no longer black. There was something stone dried about her, something suspicious. I slowly recognised who she had become. The reason I felt compelled to see her? The reason why so many years ago she left something indelible in me? It was something I recognized in myself. Within a few hours my suspicions were confirmed. Ana Corbero is an alcoholic of the most desperate kind.

We walked up the small cobbled hill from the apartment to the Casa Curro Montoya… her favorite restaurant. She flamboyantly kisses the owners and lavishes us all with praise. We sat in the hot sun and drank white wine and ate greasy jamon. Immediately, without prompting, she started telling me how her marriage was over. Her husband was a liar, she said, and she didn’t know if she could stay married to him.

“He lies about his father and their relationship. I am married to a stranger.”

I was baffled why this should be reason for divorce but Ana, it turns out, is obsessed with her version of the truth. Under the parasol that dreamy afternoon I found her deeply personal over sharing electrifying. I was being inducted into a tortured world of intrigue and family drama… it felt intoxicating. She contemptuously described her adopted children, how her lazy teen son lied and failed at school. Her pre teen daughter stole and refused to respect her Mother’s authority. I ask about their eldest daughter. “Oh, her.” she mused distantly. A slight smile flickered over her face. “She’s an angel.”

I do not remember driving to the Pajarita that afternoon. I drove to her home so many times the next few weeks. It is a dusty, pot holed road to Ana’s home. Red dust gets into everything, into the car, my mouth, my heart. During my stay the sharp red rocks rip into my tyres… twice. Yet, once behind the sliding metal gates of the Pajarita… decorated with dragons and comic strip birds there is… the illusion of calm. Beyond the painted blue iron gate a forest of pepper trees, oleander and citrus. Terracotta pots filled with herbs and lilies. Vines, dripping with grapes grow over pergolas affording shade, respite from the searing heat. Down an exquisitely cobbled path the simple house reveals itself. There are huge windows covered with traditional Spanish blinds made of esparto… woven reeds. Inside, rooms of various sizes at different levels filled with stuff. Ana’s art covers the walls. Piles of art books and catalogues from Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Broken china knickknacks. Buckets of architectural salvage. Most of it inherited from her grand parents. So much stuff.

Many staff run Ana’s estate and life. Annie the housekeeper and general fixer. Three nurses look after the disabled daughter. There are gardeners and flamenco guitarists, a governess for the adopted daughter and a masseur who comes daily. On occasions Ana would marshal the staff and demand they sing songs of her own composition. They did as they were told.

Annie, a simple local woman and (it became apparent) loathed by the son… was Ana’s most trusted servant. As well as dusting, ironing and making beds Annie, Ana told me, was being groomed to write Ana’s autobiography and mix her paints whenever she started painting again. Annie would also run the restaurant whenever Ana got around to opening it. Annie, forced to kiss us all as per the ‘Andalusian way’.

During the first few days of my stay we find a happy routine. I have practical considerations. I apply for my Spanish residency, open a bank account and get a phone. I take the dogs to the vet in Seville. The vet is quite the most handsome man I ever met. I decide to buy a house in Carmona. They are cheap and plentiful. Ana is incredibly helpful. She introduces me to a lawyer, a realtor and makes every effort to ease me into Spanish life. We find a perfectly preserved 16th Century house near the Cordoba Gate. I need an assistant. She introduces me to Jose, her own assistant for five years but curiously tells me he is not welcome at her home.

“He needs to pull his head out of his ass.”

Why she makes the introduction to Jose is a mystery. And why is he unwelcome at the Pajarita? Jose is a good man. Friendly and helpful. I confide in Jose. I am shocked by the way Ana treats her children, the contempt she has for her husband. I rant at Jose about Ana. She believes she’s always right, she’s never wrong, the interminable interruptions at dinner so conversations between adults become utterly fruitless and frustrating. Ana interrupts with shrill, ill-informed dissent. Blighted with a remarkable lack of insight and self-awareness Ana’s inability to see her part in any dispute caused me much incredulity.

Jose smiles and listens.

“I don’t have a problem, YOU have a problem.” Ana insists.

Three days into my visit Nabil arrives with their son. They are very pleasant but I have already had my mind poisoned against them. Expecting the worse I’m surprised to find her husband kind and considerate, compensating for his wife’s excesses. He is a gentle man and every day works hard to keep his marriage alive. Nabil shows me his watch collection, explaining how he transports his wealth around the world at times of war. In the evening, when she is at her worse, Nabil makes excuses for her rapidly disintegrating behaviour.

Their son is a perfectly ordinary teenage boy. He has a girlfriend, he has thick black hair, he is interested in sport and fashion and making money trading sneakers… we went to the fashion outlet in Seville but it was closed. He was funny and charming. House hunting one morning I paid him to translate for me. He has a keen understanding of people. He could read between the lines. He enjoys his life at boarding school.

I find him in his room trying to write. Ana has asked him to imagine a fifty year life plan. He looks helpless. An absurd request the teenager knows he must fulfill. When, after several weeks, the 50 year plan arrives Ana is outraged. Why does the plan does not include Spain and by inference… her? Why should it? Ask a boy to map out the next fifty years is abuse enough. But this was just one of many abuses, her plan to punish him for not appreciating how lucky he was that she had taken the time and money to adopt him. He could never be grateful enough. She confided that she planned to take him out of the boarding school he loved and punish him for his lack of sensitivity by sending him to his paternal grandfather… who Ana hated. Nabil, when we are on our own, desperately whispers an appeal to me,

“Please help me, can you make her see sense?”

It was no use, Ana is always hell-bent on revenge, riven by some resentment for some poor sap. Ana reminded both her children how lucky they were to have her as their adopted mother. These scenes pulled straight out of the movie Mommy Dearest. But Joan Crawford, bless her tortured soul, was a saint in comparison.

We drive to Seville for lunch with John Mack Jr. who mocks Ana’s constant, inebriated interruptions. John Mack Jr has his own demons but I wanted to hear everything he had to say. I had been very close with his brother Stephen and worked with his sister Jenna. Both relationships had come to nothing. Of course John claims he knows nothing of his sister’s appalling arrogance… he is his father’s son. He knew everything. He had his own brush with addiction, a failed marriage and traumas only the son of a billionaire would understand. Stephen Mack told me once their father would say of his enemies, “I’ll make them hurt.” His father wasn’t called ‘Mack the Knife’ for no reason. Jenna was very eager for me to meet her parents but I knew it would turn out badly, getting dragged along to events I had no reason to be at. I met Mack senior, who one couldn’t help respecting, several times. I had dinner with Jenna and her father at The Mercer Hotel and again at a High Line charity event. Jenna, Stephen and John’s parents are a great team, they donate millions to charity, they delight in taking pictures of couples in the street who don’t have selfie sticks.

I knew my father was the same as John Mack. Cruel and kind in equal measure.

When I said goodbye to John Mack Jr. after lunch (he cycled off into the hot, congested Seville streets) I knew I would never meet him or any member of his family ever again.

As I grow closer to my assistant Jose it becomes apparent that he doesn’t merely dislike Ana, he hates her. He hates her with a shocking vengeance. It is painful for him to carry such hate in his heart. He warns me to think carefully about staying in Carmona, he cautions if I buy a house in Carmona I will end up hating Ana. He warns me people very close to Ana hate her. The owners of the restaurant hate her, he warns she has fallen out with everyone who lives in Carmona, accusing them of crimes and disappointments, their relationships blighted with unrealistic expectations.

Jose describes Ana’s tantrums, how she would regularly reduce him to tears with her demands and mendacity. His impersonation of her clawing at her own face demanding she wanted what she wanted… NOW! Nothing would placate her. He tried helping her but failed. He still finds it hard to forgive himself for walking away. Walking away from the children he loved and cared for.

I took the adopted girl to meet Jose. They hadn’t seen each other for years. They cried and hugged. We wandered the streets of Carmona until midnight. Jose kept thanking me for bringing her to see him. We ate ice cream and sat in the forum. When we returned to the Pajarita Ana looks quizzically at me. Taking the child to meet Jose could be construed as an act of betrayal. I apologize for bringing her home so late.

The following day Ana is screaming at her children, “Why don’t you bring your friends to the Pajarita?” It is obvious why… to those of us who are the children of abusive parents. There’s shame and fear around alcoholism and the unpredictability of an alcoholic parent. Neither child want their friends to meet Ana. Neither want to explain her behaviour. I saw the fear in their eyes when Ana looked as if she was going to lose her temper. The night she couldn’t make the ancient iPod work and began blaming her daughter. The panicking child wrestled with the iPod, willing it to work. Finally she managed to make it play and disaster was averted. I’m sure the little girl didn’t want to be reminded once more why she should be grateful Ana adopted her and how easily she could be sent back to the children’s home.

The daughter dances, she entertains Ana’s guests with gymnastics, endless cartwheels and overtly sexual dance moves she learns from TV shows like Glee. Playing the same track over and over. I was asked to judge endless dance routines. She was desperate to impress. Yet, however hard the child tries to please… it is never good enough.

“Hold your hands like this” Ana demands. “No! Not like that… like this.” Ana lunges beside her daughter and demonstrates what she wants to see. Ana demands we all dance. I dance for a moment then I sit down and watch the scene unfold. The dance with her daughter becomes violent, twirling the child around until finally it is no longer a dance but a fight… Ana body slams the girl onto the floor. The child is crying and Ana falls badly into the television. She mocks the child for crying, mocks her use of a hearing aid. She swears at the child and accuses her of making sexual advances to Nabil. Once, in the pool, Ana tore off the child’s bathing costume, tossing it out of the pool. Ana is laughing like a maniac, the child is pleading. I throw the costume back into the pool. Then I walk away, saving the kid the embarrassment of being seen naked. Jose, when I tell him… is not surprised. There were times when he wanted to report her to the police for child abuse. The following day Ana wonders why her back hurts so badly. I remind her but she doesn’t remember the fight. She has no recollection. How much of the time is she blacked out?

“Time for drinkypoos?” She says.

Like an infirmed english aristocrat the pronouncement comes when Nabil is at home… otherwise she’s opening bottles all day. She’s already stoned long before she starts drinking. I learned not to go near the house until she is drunk or stoned enough not to be a total bitch. Waiting for an invitation to join her. If I stayed at the Pajarita I would slip away before she woke up. When her interest in me cooled her morning emails and text messages were filled with vile insults and personal attacks. By then I was employing every technique Alanon afforded me. Let go with love, they say. Every day I let her go… with love. Soon I would have to let go of her forever.

The night Nabil left for London and Beirut I was sitting by the pool with Ana enjoying a rare, balmy evening. We spent a lot of time talking about her future, her work, galleries and retrospectives. I was convinced she was capable of making the huge changes in her life necessary for her to be recognised as an important artist. We talked about male artists who were commanding huge sums in galleries and at auction. We discussed how women artists have been impoverished by men. After meeting her disabled daughter my understanding of her work swelled. The cute sculptures of girls looking heavenward meant something. Ana has spent years working out her feelings toward her disabled daughter using her art, especially her sculpture. Her work, like so many women… unlike the work of so many men, has never been contextualized. The story is never told. “Your work is beyond the vagina.” I said. She laughed. Ana is not easily complimented. So, we concentrate on her potential. I liked mulling over future possibilities with her.

Without warning she rolled toward me and laid her head on my chest.

She said, “I find you overwhelmingly attractive. I want to grow old with you.”

At that very moment I knew our friendship was over. I shifted in my seat. If I rebuffed Ana I risked her unconscionable wrath. She repeated the words.

“I want to grow old with you.”

Finally, I affected my most affable self and said,”Oh, silly… what would Nabil say?”

She lifted her head. She was not going to be fobbed off with that.

“I don’t put my head on anyone’s chest.” She began, her voice becoming defensive. She continued speaking but I could not hear her… I was in a blind panic. I knew it was over, at that moment I knew my time around Ana had come to an end.

The following days she called me names by text (fat and old) and generally took time to insult and belittle me. She denounced me as a traitor to the Pajarita. I found myself drifting to the house knowing full well what reception I would receive. She warned me, I was no longer ‘drama free’ I was accused of bringing stress and ‘baggage’ into her life. Thankfully, her friend Alfonso and his daughter arrived. Perhaps he would grow old with her? I slipped out of the pre arranged parties to which I was tacitly expected to attend. I had no interest in being around her. It was over. Soon I was packing up the car and headed north. My time in Carmona but not Spain… had come to an end.

Ana Corbero signs all her emails or text messages with ‘Luv and Light A xxx’. It is ironic because she has a dark soul. A monster for whom no cage will ever be built… unless of course she embraces sobriety and thereby solves her chronic addiction to resentment.

*Recently I bumped into Gerard Malanga, frail and limping, in a small French cafe on Warren Street in Hudson, New York and apologised for my drunken indiscretion all those years ago. Although furious at the time he sweetly claimed not to remember the incident.

Both the toffs and the chavs loathe ‘champagne socialists’. But what in hells name is a champagne socialist? Are socialists required to drink beer and roll their own fags? Do we need to shop at Lidl or visit food banks? Can’t enjoy or appreciate art or design? Can’t arrange flowers or enjoy our rich British history? Can’t travel? Can’t trade or enjoy making money without voting Tory?

Are we implying only the poor and uneducated, bereft of appreciation can vote socialist? The scavenging undedog who wants nothing more than Britain’s Got Talent and frozen pizza? Why should ‘people like that’ vote Socialist anyway? When and how were these ‘champagne socialist’ rules written and spun to shame those of us who are simultaneously well read, appreciate Pawson or Vivienne Westwood AND committed to defend the right to and provision of good health care and education for all UK citizens?

Do those who call me a ‘champagne socialist’ assume only extreme poverty, ignorance and duress will force the people to vote socialist? Yes they do.

The British, from all classes, require this understanding: are you one of us? How can another Brit expect to divine who has socialist sympathies if they are drinking champagne? It’s very confusing for a toff or a chav with limited ideas beyond fascism and racism to work out who might not think like him. Annoyingly, of course, one can not tell another’s politics by the way they hold their knife and fork.

2.

I am in Paris after a short but rather wonderful day or so in Barcelona. I met some rich young Americans who secretly loved Trump. I met a young english man who told me my instagram was terrible. Barcelona is a vibrant, teeming, international city. It is so different from genteel Seville. Seville needs a dose of Barcelona. I love the proportion of Seville, I love the people of Andalusia but the weather these past few weeks has been oppressively hot and only broke the day we drove out-of-town.

I left Barcelona at 2ish yesterday and immediately drove into three savage storms. Now, thankfully, it is raining hard here in Paris. The rain is such a wonderful relief. The car is thickly dusted inside with Andalusian red earth and outside splattered with swallow shit. There must be a hundred million swallows in Carmona. The dogs are happy to be in Paris. Little Dog does not like the searing heat. He looked beaten… cowed on the hot pavement. Dude is on a diet, Dude is losing weight. He is looks better for losing his big bum. He’s skipping around. I admit! I became one of those parents who couldn’t say no to an obease child.

Up at 7am. Corpus Christi. The Little Dog is delighted. The streets of Carmona are strewn with rosemary. There are black and white nuns taking selfies in front of the lavish shrines, there are choir boys with billowing red cassocks and freshly bleached surplice and starched ruffs running to the cathedral. Young men and women carry a ton of Jesus or Mary on raised platforms through the fragrant streets. They crush the herb beneath them. The men wrap long black bandages around their waist to support their backs. Parents and grandparents are dressed in their Sunday finery. The men wear religious medals, dark silk suits, brightly coloured ties and shirts. Incense billows from the thurible. Outside each church magnificent shrines are decorated with candles, brocade and lilies. I acknowledge the tears of the virgin… glass beads on her painted cheeks. I catch myself luxuriating in the ritual, the procession, I am moved by the costumes, the smell of myrrh, the belief. I love religiosity.

This week I took communion for the first time in years.

The corpse is resting. David Roy, my adopted father, died on Friday after months long battle with cancer. I received a short text message from my mother. I called but she was her usual rancorous self. Brexit loving, unhelpful and full of misguided disdain. She said, the last time we spoke, she wanted Brexit to take back her power. Repeating like an autistic child what she reads in The Sun and The Daily Mail rather than THINKING for herself. What power? She never had any power. She has been cheated of power. Now she wants to hand the few (who are still squabbling over the ashes of the dead at Grenfell Tower) more of everything. Including our power.

Get to it Jeremy Corbyn.

Families have been riven over Brexit. Ours included.

David Roy. What of you? All through my childhood I wished you dead.

I am 8 years old. There is a poster on the wall of my Stanley Road bedroom and on the back of the poster I wrote: I wish you were dead. Now he is. For all the abuse, cruelty and misery of our childhood… he suffered a few short weeks of excruciating pain.

My mother was sad because at the end he was so weak and demented. She remembered him strong and active. She said she was, ‘sad’. She chooses not to remember him as the violent, vicious abuser he was. She chooses to forget how he tried to run her down when she attempted to leave their vile marriage. Her boyfriend remembers, surely the beating David Roy delivered leaving him broken and bloody? My friend Ana said, good riddance.

The end of such a potent chapter in my life. I am unusually confused about his death. I am elated and strangely moved. I owe him something… I have waited for this moment my entire life. I remember how he refused to let Billy Childish stay at our house one winters night after he and Rachel missed the last train home to Rochester. I remember, he hated the miners and loved Margaret Thatcher. I wore my Solidarity With The Miners badge. He was furious. He voted Tory. The most vicious, self-serving kind. He took me to watch football every weekend. He took me to the garage where he worked and I snorted petrol fumes to get by. My childhood, in that house… was excruciatingly dull and filled with fear. That family, those people, those limited, strangled ideas.

Now, of course, they embrace Brexit.

My brother Stuart had children his own father was loathed to see. My brother Stuart was also beaten. He said to me once, “He would have gone to prison for doing what he did to us… if he had done that today.” Bloody right he would. And then I remember just how much effort it took to forgive him. And when I went to see him and told him that he had been cruel but I forgave him and he tried to hug me but I stood as stiff as a board. He was working in the arcade on Herne Bay promenade. He was wearing latex surgical gloves. He worked hard to ignore his crimes against us and we in turn colluded with him by not calling the police… like so many families held hostage by men like that.

I told my mother I forgave him, she said, “Why did you do that? You let him off the hook.”

“No”, I replied, “I let ME off the hook.”

I have never forgiven my mother. I have never attempted to forgive her. I have only tried to make things better for her by persuading her to take what was hers. She refused my advice. She left with nothing. I’m sure this blog is just the tip of the iceberg. I will write more tomorrow. Good bye David William Roy. I have your name and the scars you left on me, both physical and emotional. It looks like I am stuck with both.

I stayed at the compound last night. The sheets are edged with delicate lace. I left the dogs at home so I could sleep without disturbance. I slept solidly and woke at 6am. A light mist covered the immediate landscape. The gardeners were hosing the paths, the foal was feeding. A large flock of geese keep a watchful eye over me. I drove home to two ecstatic dogs. We walked beyond the Cordoba gate. A rough, dusty path.

They went to the vet yesterday. The little dog needed his anal glands expressed and Dude has an ear infection. Total for visit and medication: $40.

After walking them both, The Little Dog and I (punctuated by a brief and violent encounter with a mini pincer) walked to the forum and drank the most bitter espresso. Early mornings in Carmona are cool and busy. Spanish friends and neighbours chatter, the din echoes from the marble floor up to the roman arches. Hundreds of equally noisy swallows dive in and out of the Ficus.

I don’t understand a word. I order my coffee and sit quietly enjoying the breeze. I am invisible. On the way home I speak to no one. I nod if they speak to me. I am invisible. I linger outside the house I like on Dolores Quintanilla. My phone only works with wifi. I am invisible.

The gardener harvested huge baskets of figs, tomatoes and aubergine. The kitchen staff washed the red earth away from the purple and cream vegetables and delighted over the bounty. The larder is full.

Last night we took Lily for one of our late night promenade around the city. We talk to old ladies about houses: empty, abandoned, for sale. We find a cobbled lane and see an ancient house with weeds growing on the roof. The windows are un-renovated, the bars have been fashioned by a blacksmith and not a machine. The door has large mental studs hammered all over it. Opposite there is an elderly widow sitting outside her house in a deck chair. We ask her what’s for sale, is the house we like for sale? She stows the chair, fetches her crutch and takes us to meet her neighbours. She raps on their windows and whispers secrets about them to us.

90% of the ancient alley is for sale. A man from Madrid bought three of them, bricked up the windows and doors and they never saw him again. Behind every door in the ancient part of the city there are endless surprises. Courtyards, roman tiles, arches of marble or hand-made brick. The best properties have been lived in but left untouched for 100 years… and there are plenty like that.

In our local restaurant, a few steps from the house, a young and handsome Spaniard practices passing a muleta they keep for decoration behind the bar. A muleta is the stiff, pink taffeta cape used by the bullfighter to conceal the sword. There are many styles of pass, each with its own name. The verónica is a pass in which the matador slowly swings the cape away from the charging bull while keeping his feet in the same position. The faena is the final series of passes before the kill, in which the matador uses the muleta to manoeuvre the bull into a position to stab it between the shoulders, cutting the aorta. If this fails he must then cut the bull’s spinal cord with a second sword, killing it instantly. The task of killing the bull is given to the matador alone; his title means “killer”.

The young man in the restaurant had such grace. He was impossibly beautiful. His friend wraps an arm around him as they leave. There are bull fights on the TV in the bar. It’s hard to watch but god… it’s honest. Killing the bull. Eating beef. Sport, entertainment… luxury… death.

Back in the USA I am preparing for my own fight. I am preparing. I am holding the cape. I am concealing the sword.

The heat is overwhelming. A blanket of scorching air thrown over the city. The dogs wilt, I pretend it’s just like Malibu but… it’s not. Southern Spain. I’m driving to Nice this week, then on to Paris and Chamonix to pick up my stuff. I managed to leave things all over the place. Ditching supurflous stuff along the way. Lightening the load. Occasionally I look at Dude and wonder if I should ditch him… poor crippled Dude. His back legs giving in, he wants to catch up but he just can’t. I can’t. I can’t leave him behind.

At 5am, I took my coffee cup and the Little Dog. We sat quietly looking out at the wide open plain, great fields of sunflowers, traffic snaking here and there. Sitting outside the Cordoba Gate. What dramas happened here? Who was allowed in and who was kept out? The two large fortified towers flanking a Roman arch were built around the 1st century A.D., with Renaissance and Neoclassical renovations. It was designed to protect and reflect the great wealth Carmona enjoyed for hundreds of years.

A man arrives with his chestnut gelding. As the horse drinks from the stone trough he drenches the beast with a plastic bucket. How welcome that trough must have been to those who arrived (for hundreds of years) on horseback over this arid plain. Waiting for the great doors to swing open, waiting outside the Cordoba gate, waiting to be let in or not.

I am going to stay the weekend in Italy with Rachel. Near Pisa. She has a donkey and two beloved cats. At night Carmona is over run with scavenging cats. Hundreds of them, like rats in New York. They are too confident to be scared by me or the Little Dog even though he makes an occasional and pathetic attempt at charging them. Their backs arch, they hiss and show their claws. He stops a couple of feet away and makes his strange whimper.

Last night my friend Jose and I explored the ancient part of the city. At 10.30 it was still very hot. Then suddenly the wind comes from Cadiz, from the ocean… 60 miles away. You can taste the salt. We turn a corner and the welcome breeze fills our shirts and closes our eyes.

We were chronicling abandoned houses, with or with out se vende signs written on them. Taking note of the location of each. “Everything is for sale in Spain.” The realtor says. There are palaces and broken shacks, old towers and ancient islamic, crenelated walls formerly part of the old city fortification that crash into very ordinary houses and quite by accident these medieval battlements, parapets and mouldings are consumed and preserved.

Everything in Spain is for sale. They see me coming: the friend of the rich celebrity. The price of everything jumps $40k. They show me the same houses they showed other friends two years ago. Unlocking ancient doors, we wander through huge homes once occupied by many families. There are slim balconies, stone steps leading to terraces looking down on secret courtyards. There is pigeon shit and kittens mewing in every room in every house we saw. Abandoned lives: a simple chair, a faience pot, a richly embroidered matador’s jacket hanging on the wall. Left behind, like my luggage in Paris and Chamonix.

Jose asks me why I want to live in Carmona. They asked me about Tivoli and Malibu before. Why does anyone want to live anywhere? I don’t know. I could live anywhere and nowhere. I am transient. I am free of possession or need for possessions. I go where I am safe. It is safe here. I lived in so much fear in the USA. Fear of being caught without my papers. Fear of the state. I was not rich or powerful enough not to live in fear.

We wake at 4.30am. We siesta after lunch. The streets fill, the shops and bars open after 9pm. During the day Dude will not leave my friend, he hides under their garden furniture. I keep the dogs out of the heat as much as I can. The Little Dog is gradually (slowly) recovering from his facial paralysis. He’s still very droopy but he’s coping. He’s doing the best he can. I’m doing the best I can. I am covered with sweat and dust. My nose is crusty, my eyes exhausted. I am recovering my optimism.

Since leaving the USA I am not plagued with ideas of death, with dark thoughts, with hopelessness. I am not hurting myself by investing in old traumas. Not here. I don’t want to die. Not where there has been so much life for hundreds of thousands of years. I am a smear soon to be forgotten. My unpopular views on social media but dust. It’s incumbent on me to stay alive. To rejoice. America makes a man vulnerable. It destroys ones trust in humanity. I came to loathe so many people in the USA but I hated gay white men more than any other. They are vile and crude. They espouse ideas of love and acceptance but practiced hate and exclusivity.

Today we are having lunch in Seville with Spanish gays. I am excited. The gay men I meet here are so generous. They touch my shoulder, they embrace me warmly. At first I shrank from their kindness. I learned not to trust white gay men. But, I’ve warmed to them here. They understand. They understand what horrors I endured in the USA.

One thousand 800 miles. Driving. I began this adventure a little ways outside of Turin in a drowsy hamlet called Cinaglio, an ancient place clinging to the side of a steep hill. During this haphazard journey I planned to revisit old friends. Old friends and familiar locations.

I’ve already written how I left the USA, visiting my sister in Canada. I’ve written about arriving in Paris and staying with Mary in Sevres, I touched upon my time in Chamonix and driving under Mont Blanc but I haven’t published any of that. I’m sure it answers questions some want answering. I’ll publish when I feel comfortable.

Cinaglio, I stayed in a magnificent 17th Century farm-house set in the glorious Piedmont countryside. The house belongs to my friend Maria. We are all about the same age. We have lines on our faces and odd blemishes. I met Maria 20 years ago with her cousin Xavier. I was on the jury of the Turin film festival. They invited the jurors to her house and even though we spent only a few hours there, both Maria and her house stayed vibrant in my memory. She latterly visited my home in Whitstable and ate crab.

We arrived… nothing had changed. Not in 20 years. It was just as I had remembered it. The unused, dusty chapel, the tumbledown brick barn. The views over vineyards and sweeping lawns. It was formerly Maria’s mother’s house and really hasn’t been touched for 50 or so years. There is no internet or little else to prove the 21st Century was 17 years in. The Little Dog and Dude immediately set to exploring the gardens, digging under fallen trees and hunting lizards. Maria left the house for us and stayed else where, she filled the fridge with local delicacies. Ham and apricots, hazelnut cake and coffee. The night we arrived Maria and her fiance very kindly treated us to dinner. We ate in the waiting room of an abandoned railway station. There were endless courses, pasta, raw meat with truffles and braised donkey. I looked at them enviously drinking red wine and wanted to join in… but didn’t. Yet, I’ve never been more curious.

Did I mention I stopped going to AA meetings? Several months ago? The problem with AA? AA claims all your successes and blames you for all your failings. ‘I stopped going to meetings,’ is the number one excuse people give who start drinking after long-term sobriety. But why did they stop going to meetings? After 20 years I can tell you. I was bored. Bored with the same stories, the same faces, the 12 steps, the bumptious newcomers and… the ghastly old timers trapped between their arrogance and their low self-esteem. Of course not all of them were like that. But mostly they were. And what’s more? I hated who I was becoming. I loathed the fights and the resentment only AA afforded me.

Leaving a cult after so many years is bloody hard. A good cult will own your life then blame you for turning your back on it.

I stayed with Maria in Cinaglio for 4 wonderful nights. The second night she threw a lavish dinner at the house for 12 of her friends. They drank desert wine. It smelled delicious. We ate chicken and pork.

The following day we had lunch in Turin. Turin is a magical city and scores high on the list of places I would consider for my next home. I’m sure if the Romans who planned the city of Turin returned at any time they would still recognize it. The snowy alps in the distance, the River Po and the Beverly type hills overlooking Turin’s orderly grid would have perfectly oriented a time traveling Roman. The apartments I saw for sale on-line are lavish and well priced. The streets are crammed with interesting people and after lunch we were entertained with a boisterous ‘decriminalize cannabis’ march headed by a charismatic drum major who filled the street with a vibrant drum display that cracked through us like thunder.

I discovered Zara Home. My dirty little secret. I love this store.

The little dog is less wobbly but not as confident. He thinks twice before jumping into the car or onto the bed. His face is still squiffy. He can’t close his eye, he has solutions… ingeniously wedging his face between two pillows forcing the droopy lid to cover his exposed eye. The week before last he was a young dog and today he is an old dog. It comes on quite suddenly… old age. I suppose I thought he would be the same until the end. Just himself. But he’s not himself. That’s a painful thing to see. We seem just one step ahead of death.

My US phone ceased functioning after my first few days in France. Rather than call AT&T I decided not to have a phone… or rather I would wait for text messages and emails whenever I could log onto the internet. It forced me to look at the landscape, I listened to music. Massive Attack reminded me of Gulshan and Bournemouth Film School and the beach. It reminded me that I hadn’t smoked weed for nearly 21 years.

The road from Turin to Monaco was empty and the tolls were expensive. The Italian Riviera looked very interesting and certainly worth a closer inspection.

In Monaco I struggled onto a train with my luggage and two dogs. The train to Nice was easy. I found a delightful hotel in the old quarter where I spent the next four nights. From Nice it was convenient to catch up with old friends and revisit the Cannes film festival. The last train from Cannes to Nice leaves at 10.41pm so I had no option but to leave the festivities and do dog duties. In Nice I had lunch with Tim Fountain and saw Cassian Elwes, meeting his new girlfriend. I hung out with a bunch or errant Brits and Irishmen. We found a comfortable lounge and drank grapefruit cocktails and I met actor Laurie Calvert who is very sexy indeed.

The final day was a little frustrating as the credit card company decided to block my credit card. I had failed to tell them I was going to France. It took 8 hours to unblock. I finally picked up my rental car a day later than expected and started my drive to Carmona.

A few miles outside of Cannes I stopped at a service station and standing outside were M and S, a pair of German engineering students hitch hiking from Munich to Barcelona for charity. They had to perform certain stunts along the way for which they were compensated.

I’m sure we all remember the moment Aschenbach lays eyes on Tadsio in the film Death in Venice and is immediately consumed by the young man’s beauty. Well, I have to tell you when I first saw M and they asked for a lift and I said yes… I rather hoped they might have found a better ride whilst I was in the service station buying provisions. I knew having him sitting beside me for 4 hours was going to be excruciating. What’s more… one of their stunts was to drive without pants in the car. So, I had a semi naked German god sitting next to me pantless in the car. He was very well aware of his exquisite beauty and how he was affecting his driver… me.

Then, at his behest, we started telling each other our stories. I told mine. Then he started his. His father had recently committed suicide… his father was my age. A theme was emerging. My sister and I had discussed our enigmatic dead father. The boy’s story… and I was on my way to see a friend whose father had recently died. I was overwhelmed not only with his beauty but his wit, sincerity and strength.

I left the boys in Barcelona. They had to swim and dance and take picture. There was a moment when he was totally naked in front of me, shamelessly changing out of his swim costume. Looking at me, his piercing green eyes. He was gifting me a lifetime of memories. A beautiful 24-year-old with golden hair and heart… a thousand tears he needs to cry.

That night I found a small hotel in Valencia. I lay thinking about the boy and how fathers can deliberately and cruelly leave their loving sons. “Nobody expected it,” he said. I was exhausted. I slept soundly with the dogs and woke refreshed, I ate a hearty breakfast, chiros and thick dark chocolate. Spain lay before me. Soon the industrial North gave way to red earth and olive trees, vineyards and moorish architecture. I sped toward Madrid, Cordoba and Seville.

​
I am sitting in the hot sun, drinking espresso on the terrace of a perfect beaux-arts terrace. The French alps tower around me. Specifically, Mont Blanc glistening like a fancy frosted desert, a choppy blue glacier advancing to its right, over our heads tiny humans paragliding, spin and plunge.

Sadly, there is trouble in paradise, my serenity smashed to pieces whenever I open Facebook. I am not forced to open Facebook, my fingers with their virtual muscle memory… like billions of others, slide over the smooth face of my smart phone and hit the pale blue F. Instantly I am plunged into transatlantic, liberal hand wringing and chest beating.

He behaves like a deranged, megalomaniac… a south american despot you say. Yet, Americans might remind themselves that there are those of us who live outside the USA in countries the USA has royally fucked over or whose elections and way of life America has meddled. To those who have endured the chaos of American intervention Trump is the last of a long line of equally despicable Americans presidents… including the holy cow, ‘No Drama Obama’. Unlike the others, Trump is merely treating the USA as the USA has treated the rest of the world. He is crude and greedy, he intends to take what ever he wants and will share the spoils with those prepared to cut him in on the deal.

Trump is good for America if Americans are willing to take a good hard look at their behaviors these past few decades. Their collective racism, their xenophobia, their greed.

To impeach a president takes a huge amount of effort and determination, it requires consensus in both houses. My British friends fail to understand if Trump were to be impeached/removed/assassinated… there will be no snap election, no variation on Theresa May’s rig the vote. The four years the American people voted for must be played out and there is an order of succession if anything were to happen to Trump.

The succession: Trump, Pence the vice President and then Paul Ryan, leader of the house. Each more terrible than the last.

Most of my ‘friends’ on social media are fully engaged with the trump drama, the trump conflict, and desire nothing more that the easy resolution of a mini series. They are looking for a perfect denouement, a canny plot twist that will somehow give them the President they desire, the happy ending proving they were right all along.

Crazy liberals cannot bring themselves to admit what is happening all over the world: the people are tired of the status quo. They are bored with democracy, they are addicted to intensity. They are focused on their smart phone, the television and the endless news cycle that feeds them divorce, terrorism, murder and larceny.

Let me say that again: the people are addicted en mass to intensity… however it can be served by whomever can deliver the strongest dose and Trump delivers, day after day.

All Americans treat vulnerability as a opportunity. If you are sick or find yourself on the wrong side of the law… Americans will fully exploit you. Trump’s Attorney General is filling his own private jails with black and brown men guilty of possessing small amounts of weed, their sentences are non negotiable. Trump is sacrificing the land, the resources therein, from sea to shining sea… he will let you foul the water and the air. By slashing and burning he is making everyone fight for what they believe knowing most will not fight but simply retreat. He is the Goth, the Visigoth, the Vandal. He is well-known in history… he is the black cloud hanging over the advent of the dark age.

Trump is the most American of Americans. He lingers within the psyche of the nation. He is born out of Manifest Destiny, slavery and mass incarceration. Until Trump was president only the few challenged America’s despicable countenance. Liberals, democrats and progressive were cautious critics of the very same USA Trump now fairly represents.

Those who say they hate Trump refuse to challenge the systems and institutions that put him into power and keep him in power. They blindly accept the dominance of their military industrial complex, they accept the word of law. They rarely challenge their own ingrained prejudices interpersonally they criticize internationally.

Trump’s supporters will not turn on him. They blame the establishment for interrupting him, they blame the FBI. They think little of the police and the rule of law. They watch Trump battle dark forces and his fight (absurd to the rest of us) confirms their worst fears about the USA. A president who can’t speak freely without every newspaper misreporting, who can’t hire and fire without scrutiny, a leader they wanted to lead them away from modernity, back to mythical greatness.

If anything happens to Donald Trump… and it will eventually. His people will take up arms and start gunning for those they see as hindering their dream. Some dream of wax fruit and paper leaves, their garden of Eden. Their Eden will not include uppity black people demanding apologies, trans toilets or gay marriage. Women will earn less than men and keep their mouths shut when their husbands need to beat or rape them.

It is, of course, the lie of simplicity they crave, the unprompted simplicity the people of this tiny French village understand. Uncoupled from their second screen, planting black currents, walking their dogs down verdant mountain paths. I don’t know how Americans will ever find their way back, back home. To a place where they can live without fear. Fear of sickness or another taking what they have. How will they get back to something honest and kind. I don’t know. How will they ever live without their crippling addiction to intensity, shame and resentment.

The further I get from the USA the more I am inclined to believe civil war is inevitable.

1.
I want to write about The Little Dog. Perhaps that’s all I’ll write about today.

Anyone who met me this past decade… will have met The Little Dog. A slim, muscular, tan and white Jack Russell/chihuahua mix formerly known as Ziggy. You’ll remember how he is: inquisitive and grumpy in equal measure. You’ll remember the heart-shaped patch above his tail.

I found him on an unseasonably hot Californian Sunday morning at the Palisades farmer’s market after my 7.30am AA stag meeting. He was forlornly caged with a collection of yappy dogs and puppies, all up for adoption. He wanted to bite me the moment I met him and I could tell by the look in his eye that he trusted no one. He was my kind of dog. I was warned not to take him, he had been adopted twice before and ended up being returned to the shelter. I took him anyway and we battled each other for the next two weeks until he realized he had run out of options. He put up quite a fight. He ran away and hid under the house for three days, he pooed on the carpet, he peed over everything. He stared at me growling for hours then without warning, when he felt like it he would jump up beside me, his whole body pressed against mine, quivering with anticipation… but he still wouldn’t let me touch him.

The Little Dog is 12 years old. Perhaps he isn’t Jack Russell old (they can live until they are 19) but he’s maybe older than I was told when I got him. He has travelled all over the world. Travelled to London with Jake on that ill feted trip, driven the French Riviera. He has run off leash in Battersea Park, Central Park and the Jardins des Tuileries. I was not the best or most responsible owner, I let him off whenever I could, wherever I could. He has wandered in awe around the redwoods in Northern California, he has swum in the sea in Provincetown and the Mattole River. He rolled around snowy Whitstable beaches. He chased coyote with The Big Dog in Malibu, he dug holes in the sand on their private Malibu beaches and slumped into them… he enjoyed the love, lifestyle and freedom most dogs could only dream about.

There were times he paid for his independence: he was bitten by a clever coyote late one night as he was peeing in Malibu. That night I broke my ankle trying to defend him and Robby had to call the vet and the hospital and generally do what he did best. There was the time I left him with Jennifer and he went exploring. The Little Dog limped home with a paw as big as my fist because a rattle snake bit him. I rushed back to the Malibu vet from Long Beach in my F150 and there he was in his cage looking very sorry for himself. But after everything… he survived another day.

As I sat in the LA county jail this Little Dog’s safety was the only thing I really worried or cared about. Jason looked after him as I languished down town and given the opportunity I whistled down the phone so The Little Dog might hear I was not dead or gone or had deliberately abandoned him. When I returned after 3 months he looked at me askance. I could see him thinking, ‘I moved on from you. I thought you were dead’.

Last week The Little Dog began to show all the signs of facial nerveparesis. FNP is a dysfunction of the seventh cranial nerve, the facial nerve. This condition is evidenced by paralysis or weakness of the muscles of the ears, eyelids, lips, and nostrils. The cause of this disease is impairment of the facial nerve, or of the place where the nerves come together, and it affects the electrical impulses of the nerves involved. Sometimes the ophthalmic system is affected as well, interfering with the function of the tear glands. Most often these symptoms are evidence of brain cancer.

His droopy face, like he had a stroke, his wobbling gait. It was very distressing. I spoke to every American vet I knew had treated him and they prepared me for the worst. The long weekend in France meant I couldn’t get to a vet until last Tuesday which turned into Wednesday. Each day his symptoms got worse. He sneezed and fell over. He cocked his leg and fell over. He drools and his left eye looks dead. He was lethargic and miserable.

Finally, I took him to the veterinary hospital near Annecy and a wonderful vet called Dr. Gay. She scanned his brian and found no cancer. No infection. Nothing. They suggested a head trauma he sustained in Toronto at the nail clippers might be the reason for his condition. Or… a violent pull on the leash. They told me it would take three months or so for him to get better, or maybe he would never look like he used to. They told me to massage his face, irrigate his eye, and clean food remnants from his gums.

My friend Donna very kindly took care of the vet bills. It’s amazing just how kind people can be when there is a sick animal who needs immediate assistance.

The Little Dog no longer jumps up onto the bed and waits to be lifted, he is uncharacteristically fearful, he defers to Dude acknowledging his frailty. The change in his personality is most disturbing. I didn’t mind his change of physical circumstance but I really miss his exuberance, his tenacity… I miss my little dog. Even though he lays peacefully beside me.

2.

Homeland Security visiting my house in Tivoli was the final straw. They demanded my papers. They didn’t have a warrant so I didn’t let them in. I knew when they returned they would have what they needed to take me away. It was time to leave the USA. I had months ago transferred my property into a LLC, I signed a power of attorney. I packed a bag, I organized the dogs with their appropriate travelling papers and I called my sister in Toronto. Many rallied, they knew it was a dire situation. I had lived on the outside of American society for a long time and the pressure was getting to me.

We heard they were picking up illegals on the subway. They were racially profiling. They were demanding papers. I didn’t know if it was fake news or not. I didn’t want to find out. I took an Uber.

The Trump presidency unleashed a wave of domestic fear and terror. Those who feel it most keenly: Americans who voted Clinton, black Americans and specifically aliens living in the USA illegally. However, it needs stating: Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, are used to unleashing terror on others all over the globe, naively unaware they were just as vulnerable at home. How many military coups has the U.S. directly aided… in direct contravention to U.S. law, if not orchestrated? Under freedom-loving Obama, there were at least three — in Honduras, Egypt and The Maldives, all against elected governments.

The media screams impeach, the Democrats run from pillar to post like a plague of mice looking for safety. One day FBI Comey is their enemy and the very next day… their best friend. The most absurd argument, the most convoluted Democratic explanation for Hillary’s spectacular loss? Hillary won the popular vote but the Russians lost her the election. At no time do the these self-righteous Democrats ever take time to understand their part in this devastating turn of events. Trump is the most american of americans, he is greedy, vindictive and narcissistic, he is the very essence of almost every american… perfectly distilled, taking his rightful place as their president. And why will there be no impeachment? Because that would require congress be interested in the rule of law.

As President Trump becomes more isolated and embattled, so he will become more extreme. His friends will be the worst of them, those already isolated by public opinion and the liberal elite. No one wants to work with this president, his staff and sphere of influence shrinks daily. He is often described as a south american despot. Yet, if he were deposed, impeached or crudely removed from office there will be unimaginable violence unleashed upon the USA, a civil war one hundred years in the brewing. The liberal elite think if this happens their safety will be assured, but those to whome they entrust their safety are the very men and women who put Trump in power and watch with continuing glee as he strangles the establishment.

From the foothills of the French alps I look back at my time in the USA asking myself: why did I stay so long? Holding onto a dream that things could be different… if only I held on a little tighter.

I knew if I left the USA I would be banned for a decade. The U visa I had been promised when I sued LA County had not materialized. Dark forces needed to be addressed. I know how Americans exploit the weak. An ‘opportunity’ in the USA is merely code for a vulnerability. As millions became vulnerable after the 2008 crash so the rich luxuriated in taking whatever they wanted at bargain basement prices.

Unwilling to be subject to removal proceedings and the prospect of rotting in a private jail reserved for illegals I began my retreat. I stayed for a week on a beautiful farm overlooking the Catskills. Well equipped, comfortable but excruciatingly lonely. I visited my Tivoli house a few times but only to pack a bag and oversee a renovation I knew I would never enjoy.

People said, your opinions on that blog will get you into trouble.

As I left the USA I felt a huge weight lift off of me. Anyone who escaped tyranny and oppression will relate to this. Americans don’t care who leaves the country, they only care who comes in. The Niagara Falls border has a concrete conduit along which one leaves. As we exited that fascist gutter I began to quake. I could feel freedom opening up before me. An unexplained joy… a joy I hadn’t felt even as I left the LA County Jail.

I came to understand the day I left LA County I merely exchanged one jail… for another.

I’ll write more these coming days about my flight, the day the police raided my house and the long-term implications.

3.

3 weeks ago Mary and I walked the dogs through the ancient royal hunting grounds that wraps around Paris, near Sevres. The view over the city: just as I wanted it to be. The Little Dog was curious and nimble, Dude’s back legs gave him problems but he keeps up valiantly. Mary knows every house in Sevres, the history and occupant of each. At the end of her street there is a huge verdigris statue of Leon Gambetta. He died here. He had one eye, like my father.

My father. My father was the focus of so much last week and the week before that.

I arrived in Paris early Sunday morning from Toronto where I had been staying with my sister, Natalie. We met for the first time last week. How many different feelings one has when one meets ones long-lost siblings. I stayed at her house for 10 days. She was kind and helpful. I met her daughters and fell in love with my niece Kathleen, Natalie’s eldest who has a marvelous boyfriend with a superb art collection.

When we were on our own in my sister’s car we talked a lot about my father. Her relationship with him. How disappointing, violent and cruel he was. Like his other wives, Natalie’s mother ran away from her abusive husband. She secretly had passports made, she found money for flights to Canada and when she landed changed her identity and the identity of her children. She abandoned a relationship with her own parents to save her kids from being abused by my father. As teenagers she finally told them the truth about our dad. Despite protests and dire warnings both Natalie and her brother Mickey wanted to meet him.

They didn’t have to wait long, our cousin Keyvan always searching for family members chanced upon Mickey who had reverted to his birth name of Khazaei.

When Natalie and Mickey contacted my father he was overjoyed, Natalie had always been his favorite he said. Natalie and Mickey travelled to Europe to meet him. Our father pretty much ignored Mickey and overwhelmed Natalie with gifts. When they were on their own he asked Natalie to choose between her mother and him. He offered her a luxurious life, endless travel and shopping… on the condition she never saw her mother again.

Natalie’s mother had bravely escaped the prison my father called a marriage. Of course, Natalie said no… she wouldn’t make any such choice. This infuriated my father. They were staying in a hotel in the South of France. He became violently rageful and smashed every piece of furniture in his hotel room. He had the mother of all tantrums because his daughter said no. Natalie told him she was leaving and never saw him again. She confirmed what I had heard from others but it was still very difficult to hear. Why is it so difficult? Because I feel as if he is in me. The dark soul. The complication. The anger.

As my father lay dying he wanted to punish his children for not dying. Thankfully he was too weak to beat them. Days from his death of pancreatic cancer my sister Rebecca refused to do his bidding, as she left the hospital room he tried to throw something at her but was too weak, she looked into his pathetic face and smiled. He could no longer punish her when she dissented.

Enough. It was hard to look at my sister eye to eye because of him. I felt embarrassed by him. Like I was him. She is a strong and beautiful woman. She had a wide smile and long black hair. When we talked about him (our father) it was easy to ask a million questions but I often didn’t want to hear or acknowledge the answers.

My father’s story is part myth and part psychological horror. Kuros Khazaei existed in a netherworld of violent gangsters and naive girls. He opened clubs, coffee bars and shopping malls. He sold fake antiques to Saudi princes… he wore beautiful clothes and drove expensive cars. If he hadn’t been so utterly vile his story would be worth repeating. If he hadn’t been Persian he would be as famous as the Kray twins. At the end he could not lift his gold lighter to throw at his youngest daughter in a final act of violence against the children he claimed to love.

It’s annoying enough having to lie about my age or endure a world of gays judge my acceptability based on the one pic I have that conceals my identity, gives me a masculine edge, attracts the right kind of guy and presents a youthful visage.

I live mostly upstate, I’ve met lovely people here using apps. I spent three delicious days last week luxuriating in the arms of some traveling gay man. The time limitation only adding to the sexual delight. We packed a ten year relationship into three days. Perfect.

I am constantly reminded that any app where gay men meet should only be considered for sex. Fuck. I’m exhausted by the sexual unmanageability of others. Another flaccid, blurry, cut or uncut pic of yet another penis. The skanky ass pic… misguidedly sent with the intention to allure.

2.

Last year I wrote:

Reading how my informed, affluent friends get the average Trump supporter so wrong. Fascist? Maybe. Hitler didn’t steal Germany on the promise of killing Jews, he promised a fairer society. He inspired the downtrodden. He wanted to make Germany great again, he wanted to improve the self esteem of the German people. It’s easy to make these bland comparisons. Trump and Hitler. But I ask you, what’s YOUR part in this? We are all responsible for creating the kind of voter who supports trump. Were you ever interested in equal pay, for the end of illegal wars or the demise of the American Dream? As long as you could indulge in the worst excesses of capitalism. Your idea of equality is not shared by those millions of people left behind after the banking crisis. You didn’t give a damn about those whose homes Obama could have saved but didn’t. You couldn’t care less about a living wage for the most hard working among us. Your desire for Clinton’s more of the same… has a shelf life. It is coming to an end. Chaos is nigh.

Like many people I think a lot about Trump, how right I was about his rise to power and how I foresee a bloody rebellion in our future. At present his followers seem quite demure but given the opportunity, the motivation or goaded by Fox News this can change in a second.

However much I may loathe Trump I am continually reminded and want to remind you: Donald Trump is uniquely American. He comes as no surprise to the rest of the world. For many he merely confirms what the rest of the world already knows about the USA: that profit, ignorance and selfishness… the essence of zombie capitalism are valued beyond humanity.

When Americans complain about their elections being rigged they forget just how often they stayed silent as they rigged the elections of other sovereign nations or simply overthrew hostile governments. When Americans complain about trump they forget that most of the world has been treated as trump treats the USA. We got used to it, so will you.

I put the shelves on the wrong wall. It’s going to bother me until I move them. My friend, who had them made for his house upstate, practically gave them to me. I have two sets, made of gun-metal. One is loaded with an absurd number of dishes/bowls/glasses the other, I’ve filled with books. I haven’t had the books out of boxes since they were brought from Malibu. They look very fine.

Instead of moving the shelves, I re-balanced the room. It looks huge.

I’m sitting in Murray’s, our local coffee shop… there are a couple of buff gays sitting beside me, they are wearing tight t-shirts, their eye brows plucked, their lips plumped. They are describing a straight friend of theirs who is getting married. They are coming to terms with his fiancée. They don’t approve of her. Without a hint of irony one of them damns her,

“She’s a little too attached to her appearance.”

As his friend nods in agreement, I nearly choke on my ‘Eggs Your Way’.

MEANWHILE. The trump clown car is circling the reservation. He’s tooting his horn, his over sized, yellow daisy flopping around in the cold night air. His make up is perfect, his grin supreme, his flintstone legs going ten to the dozen. Like Victorian ladies the Dems are outraged by everything he does, they are addicted to indignation. Every so often they get a case of the vapours and faint quite away. Critique, however refined, of any democrat cheerleader’s outrage condemns the critic to accusations of treason. To disagree means that you too… are a stupid trump supporter. Celebrities, unsurprisingly, are particularly egregious anti trump twitterers. Depending, of course, on the blind devotion of their fans. Occasionally I waste an hour or so battling Democratic celebrities, Don Cheadle is perhaps the worst at assuming anyone who disagrees with him is a Trump supporter and marshalls his fans accordingly.

Yesterday Don is all up in his grill about Donald and the Russians. His fans are equally furious, echoing back Don’s inchoate decrees. The Russians.

Hey! Don! Get this: nobody cares about Russia more than you do. Whipping yourself into a frenzy. This is what you did during the election. Got yourself into a tizzy and then you thought Trump wouldn’t get elected and then he did, and now you think he’s going to be impeached because you are ‘fighting every day’. Well… I’ve got some very bad news for you. Donald Trump is not going to be impeached… because nobody gives a shit about Russia and everybody’s trained to hate Isis now. I don’t even get the Russian thing. So? Maybe somebody from the Trump team were talking to the ambassador. Isn’t that what politicians are meant to do?

Then Obama gets involved. Fuck off Barrack. Obama should butt out of this. He should just vanish before we remember how ineffective he was… unless he was on Jimmy Kimmel making everybody laugh whilst he was secretly bombing Yemen with drones killing innocent children. Let’s remember… AGAIN, Obama opted not to help the working poor after the financial crash by letting the banks throw defaulters out of their homes. He sided with the banks against the people. But hey ho… he’s so funny and he stayed married to Michelle. Blah blah blah.

Finally, a few weeks ago I started chatting with some guy on Grindr. Why? Are you asking me why? I ask myself that too. The guy was handsome, a bit short… and I quickly identified him as one of the suburban ‘pink belt’ gays I’ve tried very hard to tolerate. Listen, you may not believe me but I tried very hard tolerating them. God help me I tried. Sitting with these man/children at dinner, drinking too much, eager to climb into their leather drag (unconvincingly) then out of it again and into which ever hot tub or pool they can locate within the locale. On the whole (other than one other tall Brit) these upstate gay men are very short, very white and very put together. They discuss their schedules, they discuss their summer plans or next autumn or where they will all ski next winter. They travel in packs. They echo whatever anti trump chat will get them the most likes in a continual game of ‘like me’.

So… I chat with this guy who sends me pictures (as we do) of his cock and ass… butt naked. He must be desperate because I ain’t no catch. Of course, it was short-lived… like every transitory gay experience. Packing a whole life into a couple of hours and a few text messages. Unless happily ‘married’ or ‘partnered’ these men are desperate to get hitched. He’s single for a reason, he lies about his height. Not that being married MEANS anything in a traditional sence to these gay men… other than a merger and acquisition. We meet, he scarcely reaches my hip. I thought he was sitting down. He’s a snooty suburban, Hillary loving gay. When the inevitable falling out happens he starts threatening me with my friendship with a mutual friend. He threatens to show my friend our text exchange. He tells me he is out to make sure we never see each other again. He tells me his pink belt friends disapprove of our friendship. He knows our friend is special to me, and he suggests membership to THAT club is worth a lot of pink gold. Let’s face it, he and his friends want continued access to the big house, the 1% lifestyle and the fabulous toys. They want a spare bed when they airbnb their homes… they want fancy vacations. He assumes I want the same and he’s in no mood to share what’s his.

We block each other. We move on, My friend doesn’t mention it but I know the dwarf has done the dirty. So, what happened to the dwarf? He’s doing what they all do… chasing his gay tail. He’s probably squealing right now about the Russians… at some drunken brunch.

Finally, had a long and helpful chat with a DP genius who helped me tremendously sort out the big idea behind my new film and how we shoot it. Being a film maker is exhausting. Homemaking… not so much.

Jeremy Zimmer reprises his role as Beverly Hills community activist. Yesterday afternoon Zimmer hosted a demonstration, an invite only demonstration (demonstrators were required to RSVP) in Beverly Hills. Recruiting a host of Hollywood stars, their star makers and heavy hitting Californian politicians to speak for ‘our creative community’. For his detractors, Jeremy flexed his Hollywood muscle. At the demonstration Jeremy Zimmer ostentatiously spoke out against President Trump and his immigration crack down.

This isn’t the first time Jeremy has thrown himself into the socially active stew. Jeremy and UTA have a highly publicised yearly event where his staff are required to donate a day or so to help others in… the ‘community’. Of course, a less fortunate community than the arts community to which Jeremy often refers. Jeremy Zimmer has his photograph taken with black faces in the other… ‘community’. Photographs that consequently appear in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

Jeremy held yesterdays demonstration in lieu of the UTA annual Oscar party. Was scrapping the UTA Oscar party a HUGE sacrifice for Zimmer? Um… no.

United Talent Agency is scrapping its annual Oscar party in favor of hosting a rally at its L.A. office and donating to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been on the frontlines of fighting the President’s executive order targeting travel from Muslim-majority countries.

They made a donation of $250,000 to the ACLU, Peter Eliasberg must be THRILLED. Think about this. Zimmer would usually think nothing of spending $250,000 on an Oscar party for his billion dollar clients. That’s just the tip of the UTA hospitality expenditure iceberg. Next time you see Jeremy’s grinning face in the Hollywood Reporter holding a basket ball next to a photo-op black boy ask yourself who is really benefiting from this public donation.

“This is a moment that demands our generosity, awareness and restlessness,” wrote UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer to staff. “Our world is a better place for the free exchange of artists, ideas and creative expression. If our nation ceases to be the place where artists the world over can come to express themselves freely, then we cease, in my opinion, to be America.”

As I’ve written before I sat most mornings with Jeremy for the best part of a decade at AA meetings all over Los Angeles. At those AA meetings I saw the true face of Jeremy Zimmer. The last time I sat with him at AA… the Palisades Bank 7am meeting, he told me never to come back to AA. I wasn’t the only one. I saw him bully many men of whom he didn’t approve… out of AA meetings. He treats AA like his own personal cult. Understand how terrible that is… those men he made to feel unwelcome (less resilient than me) had no chances left to them. At AA I heard Jeremy share misogynistic epithets and when things soured between us he was openly homophobic, casually racist. When non famous black men came to our meeting out of rehab… from west end meetings, Jeremy did not sound like the man we saw yesterday embracing the rhetoric of inclusivity. He would talk damningly about his wife and fat shame his daughter, his colleagues, his fellow agents. When Lisa Hallerman left UTA he described her as a cancer… then wished she would die of cancer.

Zimmer joined agents, execs, assistants and other staffers from the Beverly Hills office to spend three hours at Heart of Los Angeles, an organization that provides programs in academics, arts and athletics to underserved youth. UTA has partnered with them in the past for holiday campaigns, employee volunteering and other charitable initiatives.

For all of Jeremy’s community out reach… how many black agents are there at UTA? How many black execs are there at UTA? How diverse is UTA? Do his agents get diversity training or is sending them into the ‘community’ enough?

“As the Oscars draw the world’s attention to our country and our community, we must raise our voices loud and clear: The politics of fear and division do not reflect who we are as a nation, and united we can do better,” said Jeremy Zimmer, CEO of United Talent Agency.

A friend of mine, crewing a new feature asked UTA’s below the line for an inclusive (woman and poc) list for hiring consideration. The assistant sneered, “Good luck with that.”

It’s ironic to those who know him that he has taken against Trump so badly. For those who know both of them… they are almost identical. Jeremy is thin-skinned and vindictive, a spiteful bully riven by alcoholic resentment. Trump is a dry drunk. Jeremy is like Trump and vice versa. As for Jeremy’s nascent activism? As thrilled as the ACLU must be, why didn’t Zimmer step up to the plate sooner? Why wasn’t he demonstrating and making dramatic flourishes whist Obama was busily deporting millions? Why didn’t he confront Obama about his silencing of truth tellers? Why didn’t he say anything about for profit prisons or the lamentable ACA?

At his heart Jeremy can’t stand that somebody like Trump has gotten to be president, someone so incredibly similar to Jeremy Zimmer.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a loathsome proto fascist. A disruptor, a camp agitator. To the gays, he is our familiar. We all know men like Milo. When gay men are together… in private, competing for attention, without the prying female gaze, without the heterosexual male laughing like a hyena at things he can only guess are funny, men like Milo reveal themselves.

Milo is the club bitch, the bar cunt, the gym queen… who, without introduction or provocation will dismember you with a single word. He will not hesitate to identify and mercilessly herald to anyone who will listen your most tender vulnerability what ever it may be. He is the gay guy who unrelentingly critiques your clothes, your teeth, your abs… and worst of all? He is every gay man I know. He is inexorably cruel. Straight people think caustic homosexuals, diluted for mass consumption, are funny and unique.

Successful gay male entertainers like Dan Savage, Graham Norton and Alan Carr delight heterosexuals with their cutting jibes, a crippling aside masked with a cheeky grin… and the genesis of their humor? Self-defense. Ironically, these skills are honed to protect ourselves from each other, from other gays, the queens, from men like Milo. From you and me.

Do you remember the first queen you ever met? How exotic and frightening they were? Sitting at the bar. How they crossed their legs, sipped their cocktail, do you remember how they looked at you?

Milo, Hamish Bowles and I are all from the same cathedral city (and there about) of Canterbury in Kent, England. Until Milo pitched his tent in the USA I never expected a gay man like him to get any traction. I mean, have you heard him? How could anyone take him seriously? He’s a fool… but his campy insurrection and anti politically correct message were enthusiastically embraced by the Alt Right. Now, like some swishy Pines faggot bowling down Fire Island Boulevard high on meth, talking loudly to himself… he has leapt from the gay swamp into our consciousness.

Yesterday, however, an old radio interview surfaced in which Milo was accused, by his liberal detractors, of condoning child rape. Listening to the interview it became obvious to me that he was describing, albeit in his usual flamboyant, incendiary way, a very common experience for many gay teens. Overwhelmed with hormones and hornyness, unable to have sexual contact with our peers… he confessed as a boy he had consensual sex with men.

Milo perfectly described my experience as a gay teen and I’m sure we share this formative experience with many thousands of other gay men. I was sexually voracious, just like most teen boys but without any kind of outlet. Comforting myself with a cocktail of shame and confusion. Remember, when I was born… homosexuality was illegal. Like millions of others I was… born a criminal. I came out at 13. Making criminal sex choices as a young boy seemed perfectly understandable. What choice did I have? Only recently have people like me been pardoned by our government for being gay, and those who suffered in prison their records expunged.

Since Milo’s implosion the gay liberal media have kept extraordinarily quiet. It was easy to condemn Milo for hating on the trans, not so easy to shame him for his first time. What will happen if they tell their story of the older man who showed them the way? They might end up like Milo.

On Facebook, defending my own experience as a gay teen fucking men in their 30’s I was attacked by a straight women radio commentator and several straight men who refused to acknowledge that my sexperience is vastly difference from theirs. They insisted I had been preyed upon by pedophiles. They felt ‘sad’ that I didn’t understand I was a ‘victim’. They implied that unless I condemned the men I had sex with I colluded with all pedophiles. They were looking for an angle to bring me down. One of them called me a ‘narcissistic fag’. “If you are not a victim then you are a perpetrator,” they said. When I defended myself they told me how angry I was and how I should get help. Yeah, I thought… I’ve been seeking help for years to get over the trauma of being mercilessly bullied by straight people and their stringent anti gay laws. Who wouldn’t be angry if every time they held their lover’s hand in the street they risked a fatal blow?

I fought with ‘film maker’ Alexandra Billington and some dick called Ed Jones. I said:

You would like to conflate the experience of heterosexuals with homosexuals but you are wrong and the moment you understand you are dead wrong you can get off your high horse and apologize to the thousands of gay people you’ve just insulted.

As I said, me seeking out and fucking a 30-year-old when I was 13 because I was sexually isolated is not the same as a 30-year-old man grooming and fucking a 13-year-old girl. As much as you want it to be.

I’ll tell you the help I need. I need men like you to stop telling me what my experience of being gay is like. If I need help with my anger then it’s because people like you have tortured me all my life with your heteronormativity.

Alexandra Billington I suppose only characters in movies are rageful? Don’t you understand… you’re surrounded by people who are full of rage which is why we have Brexit and Trump. I don’t understand why you are not full of rage? You should be on the streets fighting austerity but you’re at home criticizing other people’s sexual history on Facebook. I can’t imagine how dull your films must be.

Hasan Piker from The Young Turks seemed overjoyed that Milo had lost his book contract, his speaking engagements and his credibility. Yet Milo lost everything for the least incendiary of any of his bitchy comments. Of all the dumb things Milo has said, of all the cruel and meaningless attacks on trans, women and people of color… he loses his book deal describing an experience he possibly shares with millions of other gay men.

What would you say if I bought an orange kitchen? Tangerine or blood orange? I’m very excited. The house is full of light reflected from the snowy lawns. There are huge icicles hanging from the gutters. Everything is melting. Everything is dripping. The stoop, partially renovated, is covered with a blue plastic tarpaulin. I make porridge and coffee every day after I make my bed. I use raw milk from Churchtown Dairy, Abby Rockefeller’s Linlithgow farm designed by Rick Anderson. Sometimes I find myself wearing both pairs of reading glasses and a woolen hat and scarf inside. Dude hates the snow, The Little Dog loves it.

Most days I eat lunch at Murray’s on Broadway. The women who writes the menu is very creative. Yesterday I ate mofongo, a Puerto Rican dish usually made with plantain but cook improvised, replacing the plantain with sweet potato. A big ball of crushed sweet potato, bacon and garlic sitting in a bowl of chicken soup. Fragrant.

There are a few dishes I cook all the time. I don’t mind cooking for myself. I like one particular dish, I cooked it last night. Chicken thighs with white beans. I threw it together years ago. Perfect for a chilly night spent at home.

Pre heat the oven to 350 degrees. Using a heavy bottomed casserole with a well-fitting lid melt butter into hot olive oil over a medium flame. Add well seasoned chicken thighs to the casserole and fry until golden on both sides. Remove thighs from pan and reserve. Add bacon to the oil and butter, fry for 3 minutes then add one finely chopped leek, one chopped onion, two stalks of chopped celery and 3 crushed cloves of garlic. Saute vegetables until translucent. Add salt and pepper, bay leaf, the reserved chicken and one tin of white beans or beans you have soaked over night, I use Barlotti beans but any bean will do. Barely submerge ingredients with equal measures of good, home-made chicken stock and white wine. Bring to the boil, cover, then bake in the oven for 70 minutes. Serve with sautéed spinach or cauliflower cheese.

2.

At Trump’s behest, immigration raids sweep further and deeper into our rural and urban immigrant communities. Friends remind me these raids happened discreetly the past 8 years. Obama deported millions. To Obama’s shame he deported more undocumented workers than any president before him. He scored no points by doing so with the republicans whose approval he so desperately sought. Unlike Obama, who encouraged ICE agents to focus on less sympathetic groups, Trump’s ICE directive has no such qualms. Agents are knocking on multiple doors in immigrant communities demanding papers. There are checkpoints on busy roads. They take anyone who cannot prove they have a right to be in the USA.

People vanish into the system. People vanished in Chile or Argentina, after the coup. Bodies appearing years later in unmarked, mass graves. Meanwhile, the elderly dictator lives elsewhere in luxurious accommodation… claiming he is innocent of crimes against humanity. This is how it begins.

Nobody really seems prepared. Everyone thinks the ACLU are going to save the USA. The courts put an end to the ‘Muslim Ban’ but border officials ignore the court. People. This is what a right-wing revolution looks like. The dictator and his trusted generals. This fledgling third world junta.

For the time being you may not notice any real difference. Resistance may mean… adding to the chorus of outraged voices on social media about this trump abomination and that executive order but mostly your circumstances will not change.

Today is just like any other day… last month, last year, the year before that. There’s food in the store, the train runs on time, the sewers are functioning. The big difference for most of us are the stories currently captivating us. The daily drama, each report more outrageous than the next. The cast of new characters. The crazy president who you, yes you… you think he’s going to be impeached. You hanker for his removal, you pray his corruption, his lies, his business deals, his baddest badness will get him removed from office… but he’s not going anywhere. He’s staying put. The impeach Trump story line is just another red herring designed to engage and disillusion those who hate/love Trump.

My friends are panicked, but I say: don’t worry affluent white friends. You’ll be the last ones to suffer. Trump is creating this alt right paradise just for you! A brand new Eden made of paper trees and wax fruit for compliant white folk… and believe me, you will comply. This is what it must have been like in Germany… when they started raiding Jewish neighborhoods. But nobody believed it. Nobody really cared… because they were just rounding up illegals, Mexicans. Oh… I mean Jews. Then one day you faint because the gardener cuts his thumb the next you are crawling over a mountain of corpses.

Acting as an English aristocrat during my formative years I would meet men and women of the British upper class who openly sympathised with Hitler and fascism. So it was I met the original alt right British leader Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana the year before he died in 1980. His mind riven by dementia.

We were invited for lunch, Charlotte Mosley (their daughter in law) and me. In the car to Orsay, Charlotte warned Oswald might mention his belief the British people were still eagerly awaiting his inevitable return to power and I should ignore his delusion if he shared it with us.

When we arrived, Diana Mosley (a dedicated Nazi) was overwhelmed… lunch was canceled because Oswald had taken a shit in the dining room.

2.

“Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than the good bourgeois order.”

Ernst Röhm, the openly gay founder of the Nazi party.

A young gay fascist, UK born Milo Yiannopoulos has stolen America’s alt right heart. Milo reminds me of another gay man, Ernst Rohm who ‘discovered’ and groomed Adolf Hitler. Röhm ran the thuggish SA, the precursor to the highly effective SS. Hitler initially protected Röhm from other elements of the Nazi Party who held his homosexuality in violation of the party’s anti-homosexual policy. However, Hitler later changed his mind fearing Röhm a potential threat to his power. Ernst Röhm was executed by his formerly close friend Adolf Hitler during the Night of the Long Knives.

Like the SA before, the Waffen-SS offered sanctuary to a large number of closeted and not so closeted gay men… (think gay priests hiding out in the catholic church), gay men in the SS were protected from the more rigorous Gestapo. Consequently the SS gays arrested the dykes, the pansies and the trans and put them into concentration camps where they were experimented on: castrated, filled with water like balloons until they exploded.

Kissing, mutual masturbation and love-letters between men served as a legitimate reason for the police to make an arrest.

Gay men suffered unusually cruel treatment in the concentration camps. They faced persecution not only from German soldiers but Jewish men and women would beat them too, many gay men were beaten to death by other inmates. The SS were known to use gay men for target practice, aiming at the pink triangles their victims were forced to wear.

Are Milo Yiannopoulos’s views abhorrent to me? No. I think he’s a clown, Trump’s gay jester who The Donald uses as evidence of non discrimination. Does he deserve to be silenced? No. At present, Milo lives on the super fuel liberal censorship affords him. As Trump’s power increases Milo’s influence will become a nuisance to the alt right. Milo’s campery will prove too much for macho fascists. As Trump’s alt right message becomes purer and more distilled Milo will be dispensed with. Like Ernst Röhm, he will become a liability.

At that time… the civil war will be well underway. Milo will vanish, added to the vast pile of bodies I see before me.

Milo referred to Donald Trump as ‘daddy’. It is maybe the first time I’ve heard my own particular bent described so efficiently, so eloquently and with so much erotic charge.

3.

For thirty years gay men have been at the heart of every major fascist movement. With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe have been gay. Fascism isn’t a nasty heterosexual habit, it is a gay thing… and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and stop smelling the amyl nitrate.

Germany’s leading neo-Nazi during the 1980’s, Michael Kuhnen died of AIDS a few years after coming out. Martin Lee, author of A Study of European Fascism, explains, “For Kuhnen, there was something super-macho about being a Nazi, as well as being gay, both of which enforced his sense of belonging to an elite. He told a West German journalist homosexuals were ‘especially well-suited for our task, because they do not want ties to wife, children and family.’”

Whenever I mention gay nazis to liberal gay men they become outraged. It is beyond their comprehension. They call me a liar and a fraud.

Now all I have to say is: Milo Yiannopoulos and they shut the fuck up.

4.

My Trump prognosis? I predict a short, violent civil war with a million or so casualties. I can hear my friends scoffing, but they scoffed when I said Trump would be elected. I’ll say again: civil war is inevitable. Rather than ignore this inevitability… we must accept a terrible truth: it is perfectly normal, when ideas become entrenched, for opposing humans in the same tribe to start afresh elsewhere or fight each other to the death. Nowadays, there’s nowhere to emigrate, we are stuck with our enemies.

At first, those who disagree with Trump will be silenced… then they will disappear. After a year or so of vengeful President Trump, random acts of violence shamelessly executed in broad day light will be ignored by those who formerly thought themselves brave. Recording these bloody incidents will result in immediate arrest and indefinite detention. As the numbers of dissidents swell, camps to house them will be built. Our ‘liberal’ society will quickly absorb fascism. Fearful of losing their jobs, their bank accounts, their social media… the people will swiftly acquiesce. They will feel safe once more, hemmed in by new laws written to restrict discredited ‘freedom’. The police will be fair but feared. We will once again enjoy apartheid and those who rock the boat will vanish.

5.

Finally, don’t be fooled by the black faces at the Oscars this year. One diverse year will not make up for the past 40. Where are the women directors? Where are the black producers/studio execs/agents/managers? Follow the real money in Hollywood, the fancy mansions, yachts, private airplanes and it leads to one place… white men. Every agency, studio head, management companies and most production companies are owned and run by mostly white jewish men. They have excluded black faces and women from the money, the power and prestige.